What does you
conscience say?You
shall become the person you are.
Catharsis
This
is still my catharsis. The routine I need to stick to day in day out, to gain a
sense of perspective and practice the basics of my art so that I may excel in
it. During the last
peak,
when I was addicted to sitting here, I churned out some not bad stuff. Here can
I write what I want, when I want, so that I may go on and write what I need to
write. Without this I soon sink into lethargy and lack of confidence. It does
matter what I write here, whether it is inane and shit. This is the foundation
from which I can build a career. Nothing is disallowed (double negative, I hate
it when that happens).
Was
talking to a friend about positive role models, and the lack of, last night. I
told her that I wanted to be my own role model. This is true. Whereas I find
many writers and musicians appealing, none of them attract me wholeheartedly. Back
to the Eponymist ideal again. The idea of individuality (Christ being the only
Christian). I can take pointers from people, but ultimately I stand alone. I
don’t believe in nationality or religion or race. At best, any social group is
a loose conglomeration. At best, unified through one or two ideals. Which is
fine. Society could not operate without community spirit. However, one of the
reasons for the breakdown of society in the west is a realisation that these
ideals have become transparent. Immigration and the global ideal are partly to
blame. The world has moved forward so fast that our narrow perceptions have not
been able to shift with it. Acclimatise to it. Our perceptions need to be
refocused. Religion and the family unit used to provide the bedrock, but they
have slowly been eroded. The downfall of at least one these is due to it being
based on erroneous assumptions, dressed up as truth. Can you guess which one?
We
have to become fluid. To be able to shift our allegiances according to the
situation. There are times when I am affected by national boundaries. Football,
I mean. In fact, sport is almost the only time when most of us feel a strong
pull from nationality (or it should be). I envisage a future where there are no
longer any nations. A persons country will be made up only of the places that
they have been to. Not an phoney affinity with people they have never met or
place they have never seen. My nation is Liverpool and Cardiff. Madrid and
Paris. Amsterdam and Bruges. I want to live in a world where in one regard a
person maybe my opponent, yet in another they will be my contemporary. As a
writer, I consider Hemmingway fascinating, but as a man I doubt we would have
much in common. He writes with a passion for his subject, but I have little
desire to experience bull fighting or fishing. This is what we should all be
moving towards.
I
believe that the purpose of the universe is to achieve infinity. The best way
for it to do that is by generating as many possibilities as possible, thereby
increasing the chances of it happening. Infinity is the point at which all
possibilities have been played out. Now, if this is true, then life on this
planet should be diversifying in as many ways as it can. Originality is the key.
Certain well meaning types will tell you that there is nothing original. That
may be true. But there is always a new spin to an old idea. A unique rendering
of prevalent influences. This is the code to which I hope to stay true. A fresh
form injected writing machine. All artistic disciplines should be in a
continued state of growth. That is why I hate popular culture so much. The
continued re-rendering and re-hashing of the same ideas over and over again. The
law of diminishing returns. These are possibilities being played out it is
true, but when so much time seems to be spent on producing works of dubious
artistic value, it is hard to see where our next evolutionary step is to come
from. Stagnation abounds and I think this is its one objective. I am a big
admirer of the Bard, but the comedy in his plays is simply not very funny. Comedy
has moved on in leaps and bounds in the last four hundred years (Python, Bill
Hicks, Spaced), just as it should.
Anarchy.
The more and more I think about anarchy, the more I read, the more I come to
the conclusion that we are all of us, for the most part, anarchists. The basic
tenet of anarchism is this: Do whatever you want to do, so long as it does not
interfere with anyone else. This is one of the principles I try to abide by: Do
what you want but do no harm. Something I’ve not always followed as closely as
I should. Now, is this not what we do every day of our lives. We may go to
work, but no one forces is us. We do it through our own volition. Okay, so we
do it to get paid, but it may be said that there is a contract between employee
and employer. A symbiotic relationship. One cannot survive without the other. We
get married, have children, but then there is merely a refocusing of our anarchic
principles. Our family becomes us and the family may do what it wants, as long
as it does no harm (including to itself).
The
problem with a large part of the anarchist movement, as I see it, is that they
only hear the first part. “What, do what I want? Cool! See ya.” “Hang on,
there’s more…Oh fuck it.” But isn’t that always the way with ideologies? They
get distorted and perverted for personal gain, until they bear little relation
to the original idea (cf. the major religions of the world)! The problem with
the anarchist movement is that it seeks to politicise what is in essence a
personal philosophy. Anarchism is a lifestyle choice. As soon as you try to
mould it into a movement it ceases to be anarchy. Buddhism is very close to
anarchism. It is essentially about meditation. When you pervert it into
religion it ceases to be Buddhism. There’s a great line in the film ‘Dogma’. All
about how humans have missed the essential point of religion. It isn’t about
religion, its about ideas. “Ideas can be changed. Religion is what gets people
killed.”
I
do not seek to enforce any idea upon my fellow man, except one. Be yourself. Be
the person that you are. What does you
conscience say? asks Nietzsche. You
shall become the person you are. Be your own religion. Your own ideal. Your
own political party; your own role model. Be your own trail blazing its way
toward the horizon. And if any other line happens to intersect yours, well then
that’s just a happy coincidence. A bonus. I think Henry Miller put it best:
…you
won’t be dead, you won’t be indifferent, you won’t be insensitive, you won’t be
alarmed and 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 answer and advertisement in the newspaper in order to find out
how to talk with 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.
Okay,
that’s enough cultural referencing for the moment. I am your sheep herder, kneel before me. Quiet!
Do you have a secret language?
Do you use lines from comedy routines and movies as shorthand to communicate
with your friends? Did you even know about the ostrich that raised the tiger
cub?
An obvious example of what I
mean is saying, “Honestly, who throws a shoe?” from Austin Powers, The Spy Who
Shagged Me, to refer to someone doing something patently ridiculous. Or
retracting some opinion previously stated as absolute fact by saying. “Oh, then
maybe it’s not green.” a line from This is Spinal Tap.
To this day, whenever anyone I
know goes on holiday or goes anywhere exciting, I have to ask, “How was it
kitten, was it magic?” in reference to Spaced. My brother and me still
communicate, often exclusively, in lines from Wayne’s World. Everything from
expressing surprise at the length, height, or duration of something by going,
“That’s like way bigger than a normal car.” adapted to the particular
circumstances, to communicating the thought that we’re lost with, “I think we
took a wrong turn, ‘cause now we’re outside.”“What a shitty circus.” and “If it’s a severed head, I’m
going to be very upset.” also get quoted in the strangest of situations.
Not so long ago, I re-watched
Wayne’s World with a friend. The next day I was in the supermarket and found
myself accidentally wandering through the feminine hygiene aisle. The first
thought that popped into my head was, “That’s not Wayne’s basement.” giggling
to myself. I do this a lot these days.
I used to go out with one girl
who was always trying to pass off Simpsons quotes as her own. “Yeah but when I
do it it’s cute.” Or ask me if I wanted a drink using the exact same voice as
Janine in Ghostbusters: “Yew want some cawfee?” We even used a line from an
Eddie Izzard routine (“We were so bored.”) when
hitchhiking as a code word through Europe for if we got a bad feeling about someone giving us
a lift (we thankfully didn’t need it).
When I lived with another ex and
her kid, Scrubs was never off of the TV. Some families speak half English, half
Polish or Urdu. We spoke half in English, half in Scrubs quotes. “Help me to
help you, help me to help you, help me to help you, help me to help you.”
The one that I’ve used to myself
all the time in the last few years is, “There you go, there’s your pussy.”It’s a Bill Hicks quote, questioning why
British porn magazines had blue dots covering all the action, but turn on
Channel 4 late at night and the sex was unexpurgated: “It’s a foreign film,
it’s art all of a sudden. Put some subtitles in there. Here’s your pussy, here
you got it. Everyone happy? There you go, it’s art godammit.”
I use it when I’ve been trying
to do something for ages and finally manage it. What scares me is that I might
accidentally blurt it out in unfamiliar company, without context. To be honest,
one of my biggest fears is that I’ll develop dementia and start blurting out
all of the things in my head. You have no idea how much self-editing I have to
perform in an average conversation. My mind is always looking for the perfect
one liner, but most of the things that pop in there aren’t appropriate. There’s
only one or two people to whom I can say what I’m thinking, and only because
their mental Tourette’s is worse than mine.
So there you go, comedy and its
polylingual uses. Future generations will speak in nothing but old comedy. You
know what you want? You want the moon on a stick. You’re just angry at yourself
because you can’t play the guitar properly. I said ‘brick’. Not ‘penis’.
Today we mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks. Best Things Ever #18
Bill Hicks: Rant in
E-Minor
“Bill Hicks,
blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a
gun around. Pay attention to Rant in E Minor, it is a major work, as important
as Lenny Bruce's. He will correct your vision. His life was cut short by
cancer, though he did leave his tools here. Others will drive on the road he
built. Long may his records rant even though he can't.”
Tom Waits
Twenty years ago this month, the comedian Bill Hicks died of
pancreatic cancer at the tragically young age of 32. Three years later in 1997,
two posthumous album were released by Rykodisc: Arizona Bay and Rant in
E-Minor. In this article I am going to concentrate on Rant in E Minor, which I
consider to be both the greatest comedy album and the greatest spoken word
album of all time.
The material for Rant in E Minor was recorded at the Laff
Stop Comedy Club in Austin, Texas in March and October 1993 and at Coobs, San
Francisco in July of the same year. Unlike the albums Dangerous and Relentless
that were released during Bill’s lifetime, Rant in E Minor, as well as Arizona
Bay, presents the material in the form of chapter points rather than as a
traditional live comedy album. It’s more like a concept album, the live
material interspersed with musical interludes performed by Bill and his
producer and childhood friend, Kevin Booth.
I’ve always found the music on Arizona Bay to be somewhat
intrusive, though it’s still a good album (it’s a Bill Hicks album). With Rant
in E Minor though, the music is pitched perfectly and serves to divide the
seventy five minute album into a series of movements or acts.
The other thing to say about Rant in E Minor is that most of
the material included is unique to this one album. There have been a number of
subsequent albums released, as well as countless bootlegs of other Bill Hicks’s
gigs, which all have significant overlap between them. Yet aside from the
bootleg of his final gig at Igby’s, which does include some of the material
featured on Rant in E Minor, it’s a pretty unique set list. Even the Igby’s set
contains many well-worn routines that you won’t find on Rant in E Minor.
Rant in E Minor is Bill Hicks at his bravest, his angriest,
his most free and his most engaging. The material from the later recordings at
the Laff Stop was recorded when he knew he was ill and any pretence that Bill
was holding back at all is gone. To hear him screaming at his audience, “You
fucking morons, you fucking morons.” is cathartic. As Hicks himself says:
“That’s what this is all about, man. It’s supposed to be a
fucking catharsis, man, you know. It’s supposed to be a release from the
fucking daily grind.”
In that catharsis, Hicks takes aim at the anti-abortion
lobby, Christianity, Billy Ray Cyrus, the perpetrators of the raid on the Waco
complex, including Bill Clinton and Janet Reno, homophobia in the military,
women who defend abusive partners and Rush Limbaugh. One of the reasons that
the comedy of Bill Hicks stands the test the time is both because of the
universality of it content matter, but also, depressingly, because of how
little seems to have changed and how much has come full circle in twenty years.
If Bill was alive today, instead of riffing about hosting a TV show called,
‘Let’s Hunt and Kill Bill Ray Cyrus’ it would be have to be called, ‘Let’s Hunt
and Kill Miley Cyrus (with special guest, Robin Thicke)’. Rush Limbaugh is
still allowed a platform from which to spout his moronic opinions. The show
Cops has been replaced by a thousand and one equally fascistic “reality TV”
programs and rather than senselessly slaughtering women and children in Waco,
Texas, it is instead in Pakistan and the Yemen that women and children are
gunned down with drones by executioners who never leave the comfort of their
armchair in some military base in the desert wilds of the United States, or
have the decency to look their victims once in the eye.
I think Bill Hicks would be appalled at the level to which
soldiers have been elevated to the level of heroes, protectors of freedom, even
as they are used as instruments of brute terror and blunt force to destroy
freedom in favour of corporate profit. He was never one to shy away from
criticism of the military, questioning why a suicide bomber was a coward but
firing Cruise missiles from a ship hundreds of miles away in the Gulf was a heroic
act. In dealing with the issue of gay people serving in the armed forces, Hicks
says:
“Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be
allowed in... I don’t care how many sit ups you can do, put on a helmet, go
wait in that fox-hole, we’ll tell you when we need you to kill somebody.”
Now, I’m sure that Bill didn’t really mean a lot of the
things he said but, like Jonathan Swift, used extreme views to present certain
arguments as reducio ad absurdium, as
well as a way to get laughs. My parents met in the Royal Navy and I exist
because of the armed forces, so I tend to give serving personal the benefit of
the doubt that they are merely following orders and they simply trust that
those orders are given in good faith. Yet I don’t think there is anything particularly
heroic about following orders, especially when the Nuremberg Trials established
that “I was only following orders” is not a valid defence (although Nuremberg
also established the invasion of another sovereign state to be the supreme international crime under
law, but that doesn’t seem to stop us).
For all the supposed threat from Al Qaida in the last decade
or so, the simple fact of the matter is that the most successful terrorist
organisation in the last hundred years is the CIA. More coups against
democratic regimes and more loss of innocent life than Al Qaida could ever even
dream of taking. They kill thousands, we kill hundreds of thousands in
retaliation. In America the repeated mantra is, “Support the troops, they
protect your freedom. “ If you need protecting, you are not free. And all that
all this killing really achieves is to intensify the level of retaliation that
will be visited upon your children after the empire falls. You would think that
the richest country in the world would have at least grasped the basic fact that
all debts get called in eventually. That’s karma, man. It’s also the Second Law
of Thermodynamics.
Bill’s routine on gays in the military manages to correct
one of the niggles I have with his early routines, especially on Dangerous and
Sane Man, where his material is somewhat homophobic (although he did out George
Michael several years before George’s own actions did it for him). Again, this
could simply be a matter of taking things to extremes for deliberate comic
effect. I like when graphic images of gay sex are used as a weapon against
homophobes and other fatheads, so Hicks’s observation that Rush Limbaugh
reminds him of “one of those gay guys who likes to lay in a tub while other men
pee on him.” is especially brilliant. Although it gets too graphic for me when
he comes to the part about Barbara Bush unrolling her flaccid labia, then shitting in
Limbaugh’s mouth. Then I have to skip forward.
I’ve described Rant in E Minor as my favourite spoken word
album, as well as my favourite comedy album, because as funny as Rant in E Minor
is, it also represents Bill Hicks at his most philosophical. The power of
comedy is in its repeatability and yet with Rant in E Minor there are so many
lines that are as much like stanzas from Dylan’s It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only
Bleeding) as anything else and worth listening to whenever you are feeling down
or need a call to action. As well as his comments on catharsis, one further example
will suffice here:
“The argument doesn’t work with me Flapjack. Go back to your
fucking crackerjack lifestyle and I’ll meet you at the evolution bell curve.
I’ll be sitting there awhile, it’s kind of a tortoise and the hare story.”
Many comedians and sitcoms can make me laugh till I cry,
even after I know every word, but there is only Rant in E Minor that can make
me actually cry. To hear Bill talk about thinking about taking his own life,
but not having the balls to do it, and to realise that in that instant he is
facing up to his mortality and the fact that he is going to die is heart breaking
to hear. He’d struggled to build an audience in his home country, but was a
star across the Atlantic. He was about to have his own TV show for real in
Britain and died right on the cusp of major success. On that day, the world
lost a true comedy genius.
In many ways, Bill Hick was a visionary and a man ahead of
his time. Some of his material, like his alter-ego, Pan the Randy Goat-Boy, was
considered extreme at the time. His honest discussions of his use of
pornography were not applauded by all and yet to listen to many comedians these
days, his comedy seems somewhat mild by comparison. The ubiquity of the
internet, it seems, has made us more voyeuristic and more cruel.
If you read Agent of Evolution, the Bill Hicks biography
consisting of interviews with the people who knew him, you see that there were
elements of his life about which he didn’t talk openly (like visiting brothels
and experimenting with just about every drug yet invented, not just the
fashionable ones). He could go too far sometimes, but there was also as much
that he held back. Compare that with, say, the average Doug Stanhope routine,
where very little is censored or held back. I love Doug Stanhope, by the way.
There has been a lot written about Hicks in the media in
this twentieth anniversary week, especially by other comedians. He has been
lauded as a fine comedian, but some question his elevation to the level of
Messiah. I don’t think Hicks was the Messiah, but I do think that some art and
artists transcend the medium in which they exist. Was Shakespeare just another
playwright? Is the Mona Lisa just another portrait? When Billie Holiday sang
Strange Fruit to hushed audiences, was that just another artist singing another
jazz standard?
There’s nothing wrong with being a comedian, making people
laugh is a fine way to make a living, but it doesn’t mean that some comedians
can’t transcend comedy. Bill Hicks wasn’t/isn’t the Messiah but with the
greatest respect to many other comedians that I listen to and love, neither was
Bill Hicks just another comedian. He was somewhere halfway between comedian and
Messiah and his genius in no way devalues the comedy of others, only drags it
up by its bootstraps. If you want to realise the potential of stand-up comedy,
listen to Rant in E Minor.
It’s hard to say what Bill Hicks would be doing if he were
alive today, 52 and grumpier than ever, but I like to imagine him having his
own weekly podcast. Anyone who listens to Greg Proops’s podcast, The Smartest
Man in the World, can get a sense of what that might have sounded like. Proops
has his own style, his own rhythms and way of doing things, but he also
channels the spirit of Bill Hicks, frequently citing Hicks as the bravest
comedian he ever saw. The Smartest Man in the World is one of the highlights of
my week and I can highly recommend it.
It’s useless to dwell on what might have been, only what is.
Bill Hicks died too young, but his comedy lives on through his recorded
material. Rant in E Minor is his crowning achievement and remains a call to
action against hopelessness. If he could be this funny and thought provoking as
he was dying, imagine what we can achieve even as we live.
Sorry this one is so late folks, wasn't feeling so great yesterday. There should hopefully be a companion piece to this up later today (when I've written it).
In Defence of Gainful Unemployment
“You know what I hate about working? Bosses. That's
what I fucking hate...
'Hicks, how come you're not working.'
I'd go, 'There's nothing to do.'
'Well, you pretend like you're working.'
'Well, why don't you pretend I'm working? Yeah, you
get paid more than me, you fantasise. Pretend I'm mopping. Knock yourself out.
I'll pretend they're buying stuff; we can close up. I'm the boss now, you're
fired. How's that?'
I don't know if I have the right attitude for the
workplace.”
Bill
Hicks
As I write
these words, I haven’t worked in more than a year. If you were to believe half
of the newspapers in this country, including the one that historically
supported Hitler and Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, this makes me a parasite, a
scrounger and an enemy of the state.
There was a
time when I had no trouble finding work, I could walk out of one temporary job
on a Friday afternoon and start the next one the following Monday. It was easy
and the jobs I did were easy. Office work is like Windows based software, once
you’ve learnt the mechanics of one system, you find that the rest have all the
same features and cheats. An office job is merely a series of tasks and all one
needs to do in order to do that job quickly and effectively is to break it down
into its individual tasks and then reassemble them into the most efficient
order possible.
I have had
jobs where I regularly exceeded my weekly targets by 200% or 300% and still
only put in three days actual work, spending the rest of the time doing my own
thing, writing or messing around on Twitter. Any organisation that employs me will
need to accept a certain amount of compromise. I’ll give you the work output of
two, three members of staff, but you may have to look the other way when I’ve
done all my work by 3pm and spend the rest of the afternoon reading Shakespeare
online.
I once had
an encounter with a manager in which she berated me, saying, “Every time I turn
around there’s something other than work on your screen.” Rather than argue
with her, I took the afternoon to clear the team’s entire workload and her
entire team had virtually nothing to do for the rest of the month.
It always
amazes me how long people take to perform the simplest of tasks. I can honestly
assess myself as being well above average intelligence in many areas,
disinterested and thick as shit in others, but the tricks and metal acrobatics
I use to get work done quickly and effectively are well within the bounds of
everyone. Most offices use some kind of software based on Microsoft Office and
if you know even a handful of the shortcut keys it can save hours over the
course of a week. Alt + Tab are the two most important key combinations on any
keyboard, as these toggle between open screens and allow you to quickly switch
from the pair of shoes you are bidding for on eBay to the letter you’re
supposed to be writing just as you boss happens to be walking past.
Avoid using
the mouse like the plague. The mouse is the great siphon of time, there is no
task that uses the mouse that can’t be done using shortcut keys in a fraction
of the time. I once watched a computer programmer friend of mine trying to copy
and paste a paragraph of text using the mouse and making a pig’s ear of the
entire task. So here’s a quick shortcut 101 in copying a paragraph of text from
one place to another:
1.Use
the Ctrl Key + Up Arrow to manoeuvre to the beginning of the paragraph you wish
to copy;
2.Hold
down the Shift Key + Ctrl Key and press Down Arrow to highlight the entire
paragraph;
3.Hold
down Ctrl Key and press C to copy the paragraph.
4.Use
Alt + Tab to toggle to the document where the text if going to be pasted;
5.Hold
down Ctrl Key and press V to paste the paragraph;
6.Done.
What with
his faffing about, it took my friend the best part of five minutes to do a job
that should have taken about five seconds.
I apologise
if the above instructions seem overly patronising, but likesay, my friend is a
software programmer and even he doesn’t seem to have mastered the basics of
keyboard manipulation. If more of us took the time to learn some of these basic
tricks, we would find that we have far more time on our hands during the course
of the work day and could get on with doing something more proactive and life
affirming.
In the 1960s
we were being told that eventually we would only have to work for an hour day
and spent of the rest of the time engaged in leisure activities. Things haven’t
quite got that far as yet, but with a little insider knowledge you can cut your
work day down by a considerable amount. I have spent much of the last decade
working in the public sector, auditing the complaints handling practices of the
legal and medical sectors and yet even there I have been able to outperform
most of my colleagues without really trying. All it takes is indentifying the
tasks that you perform time and time again and putting in place further shortcuts,
like documents of standard paragraphs or user defined shortcut keys.
I say I
haven’t worked in more than a year, but the truth is that I haven’t put in a
full day’s work in years. There is no need. Most of us could comfortably work
part time, but then the point of work has never been about gainful employment,
it’s about having the majority of the population in one location and under
surveillance, if only in some family firm. If you’re working, you’re less
likely to be opposing government subsidies of the energy companies or banking
sector. You’re less like to be causing trouble for the established order.
Unless you’re incredibly lucky to be doing something you love doing, then your
week is spent waiting for the weekend where you can spend a great deal of time
reaching the levels of intoxication required to forget about the drudgery of
your job. And if you’re pissed up on the street of a Saturday night, then the
only thing you’re going to smash up is your own community. Still better than
taking part in a demonstration against government cuts.
Even people
who go to university and train for years in their chosen profession end up
doing something trivial that they hate. The system does this to us. If western
society was any of things that it professes to be, free, fair, democratic, etc,
then everyone would have the opportunity to pursue the thing they most desire,
even if that dream was of no benefit to anyone but them. In a Capitalist
system, where the only thing which counts for anything is money, shouldn’t
everyone be rich?
It is often
said that it is inappropriate to talk about Marxism having failed because
Marxism has never really been tried, given that Communist China and Soviet
Russia were anathema to the principles in which Marx believed. The same is true
of Capitalism. It’s inappropriate to talk about being anti-Capitalist because
Capitalism has never really been tried. Noam Chomsky notes that in financial
circles economists are supposed to worship Adam Smith, but never read him,
because while Smith talked about the invisible hand of the market, he was
opposed to globalisation and, by the standards of today, was more of a socialist
than capitalist (besides, as comedian, Andy Zaltzman, points out, if you had an
invisible hand, what would you do with it?). If there are homeless people on
the streets or people can’t afford to pay their rent then this is Capitalism
failing to do the one thing it was set up in order to achieve.
Instead of
Capitalism, we have inherited a system of corporate totalitarianism, where all
of the benefits and influence have been concentrated into the hand of a select
few and the rest of us are left to fight over the scraps. Both of my
grandfathers fought the Nazis in the Second World War, one in the Royal Navy,
the other in the RAF. One died before I was born, the other died before I was a
teenager. In my most cynical moments, I want to travel back in time and tell
them not to bother. Fascism won in the end. They just rebranded it.
£5billion in
benefits go unclaimed in the UK every year. Unemployment benefits account for a
tiny fraction of the country’s total benefit bill. The energy sector alone
receives £15billion is subsidies, despite charging extortionate prices. Yet if
you are unemployed and claiming benefits then you must be a scrounger. You must
be demonised by the rest of society, be a scapegoat and a distraction to
prevent the working population from waking up from staring dead-eyed at a
computer screen or factory production line, thinking, “Hang on.” to themselves and
forming a mob. Not that a mob even is required these days. Look at what
happened to the News of the World in no time what’s so ever. We, the people
have real power, but we are kept from realising it at all costs by the thousand
and one shiny objects dangled in front of our eyes.
Like most
prejudices, the demonisation of the unemployed comes down to an issue of basic
jealousy. Most people would like not to have to work in the job that they have,
but rather work towards their dream job. In an ideal world people would be paid
by virtue of how much their profession benefits society. Bankers and
politicians would be paid virtually nothing. Nurses and the Fire Brigade would
be rich. Artists, musicians, writers, comedians etc would be paid a living wage
just to sit around and think and create. Indeed, in some European countries,
artists receive a stipend from the state to go and be artists. We deride the
befits system, but then how many sitcoms or award winning plays have been
written by out of work actors or writers subsisting on the state? Isn’t that
worth the pitiful amount we spend on benefits? I have no figures to hand, but
I’d be willing to bet that West End revenues for plays and musicals written by
writers while unemployed easily outmatch the cost of the time taken to write
three drafts of a play at £71 a fortnight.
Of course,
my great artistic hero is the writer James Joyce. Joyce, like the unemployed,
is often labelled a scrounger, including people who should know better. And
yes, Joyce did live off of handouts and endowments from rich benefactors for
many years. Yet he also arguably created two or three of the most important
works in the entire history of world literature. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in
particular are high concept novels that are beyond the skill or tolerance of
most people, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have been written.
Popularity is no measure of worth, in fact a graph plotted of worth verses
popularity is a black body radiation curve which rises quickly from the left,
but falls of towards the right (cf. Avatar, U2 and Dan Brown for
examples of the popular but god awful).
Joyce spent
seven years on Ulysses, seventeen on the Wake and I, for one, am extremely
grateful to his benefactors for allowing him the time and space to complete
those novels, for they give me great joy. The study of imaginary numbers (the
square root of -1) was for centuries nothing more than the study of a
mathematically curiosity and yet thanks to the pioneering works of the likes of
Joseph Fourier in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, we now use imaginary
and complex numbers in everything we do from radio to the internet. If we
followed the example of the economic system, where nothing is of any value
unless it is profitable, then the study of imaginary numbers would have been
abandoned as a waste of time long before a use had been found for them.
There was a
time when I could walk into a temp job with nothing more than a phone call and
be in the same role for three years, earning a decent income. These days, even
the most low grade of roles requires an interview, usually a competency based
interview. My brain isn’t built to deal with competency based interviews. For a
start, the name itself is a misnomer. Most competency based interview questions
can be broken down into two sorts, either the question is redundant, as it
refers to something already covered by the applicant’s CV, making a mockery of
the point of sending a CV, or the question is actually an incompetency based
question of the form, ‘Tell us of a time when you have been incompetent and
what you did to cover your ass’.
Interviews
used to be about assessing your character and suitability for a role, but these
days an interview is about how good you are at being interviewed. Interviewing itself
used to be a skill, now it is likely that the person who judges your
suitability isn’t even present at the interview, instead relying on notes taken
at the interview. The interviewers themselves are so busy writing that they
can’t possibly be concentrating enough on the candidate to form a opinion of
their own. Anyone who knows me knows that in real life I am fairly quiet. I
usually don’t speak unless I have something to say. I’m no good at bullshitting
and these days interviews are all about bullshit. It’s not appropriate to give
my honest answer to any (in)competency based question, which is this:
Because it’s
just a job. It’s easy and it shouldn’t require this much horseshit to become
employed. In the time you have spent asking me fatuous questions, I could have
learnt the job already, that’s how simple I already know it to be. I am quietly
confident that you could plonk me down at a work terminal in NASA Mission
Control at Cape Canaveral and I would soon figure out what I supposed to be doing.
And yes, you are right, I am extremely arrogant, but what you call arrogance I
call a sense of depressing familiarity borne out by twenty years working in
offices, where I have vested interest in learning the role as quickly as
possible, because the quicker I learn the role the quicker I can get back to
thinking about the use of synecdoche inFinnegans Wake and do this job on autopilot and never think about it
ever again, like every other job I’ve ever had. So the question you should
really be asking yourselves is, do we want to employ someone who will
uncomfortably struggle to merely hit their targets, or someone who will do the
work of two or three people without care? Your move hotshots.
Perhaps I
should memorise the above script for my next interview. Or perhaps I shouldn’t
be allowed to work in offices anymore. I’d much rather someone paid me to be a
writer though. Trust me, I have spent more time and effort writing this one
article than I’ve ever put in at work. How much its content is worth is of
course down to how much you, the reader, gets out of it. Yet like Joyce, just
because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean it has no worth. I haven’t worked in a
year, but at the same time I have done more work reading, studying, researching
and writing in one year unemployed than in twenty years of work. What’s that
worth?
I’m still
looking for a job, but I also have an A4 page brimming full of titles
for pieces to be getting on and writing. Perhaps one of them might lead to
something that isn’t mind numbing and soul destroying. My advice to those of
you that are stuck in a hateful role is stop taking pride in your work, treat
it like the insult to your intelligence that it undoubtedly is, learn the
simple tricks to get the job done in a quarter of the time and do something
more soulful and life affirming. Yes, this entire article is one of breath taking
arrogance, but ramping up that arrogance even further, take a minute to think
about it and you’ll realise that you’re just jealous. Don’t be jealous. Do
something about your situation.
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard believed the only truly
objective creature to be God. Given that
God is pantheistic (ie. everywhere), he is infinitely subjective. The only way that objectivity can exist is by
considering the viewpoint of every being that has ever existed all at once.
We are all subjective.
Each of us is a unique blend of influence and experience. The decisions we make, the allegiances we
form and myriad other decisions are coloured by those influences and experiences. Any person true to themselves will recognise
this and work within it’s limitations.
Left wing historian Howard Zinn makes no secret of his own
subjectivity. “History in an infinite number of events.” he says. “Inevitably
you must select from those infinite number of facts those things which you are
going to present… There's no way of
avoiding a process of selection. And
once you make that selection, that selection is based on you point of view,
whether you acknowledge it or not.
Whether you even know it or not."
The problem that the individual faces in society is that
there is an orthodoxy at work. A
particular subjective view purported by government and the media. If you believe in that bias or prostitute
yourself to it there are no limits to what you can achieve. However, if you hold views contrary to the
mainstream bias you will yourself be accused of bias. Of not being objective.
The political orthodoxy is well ingrained in society. It is far easier to subscribe to it because
it requires no effort. No evidence. A journalist, an activist whose opinions
diverge from the mainstream is required to qualify their opinions. To provide concrete examples far and beyond
what is required of the mainstream. And
their opinions can be quickly dismissed by reiterating the popular view.
If we recognise the limits of an objective view then we can
begin to gain a more accurate opinion of our world. Bill Hicks once said, “Sometimes I have to
ask myself what I think about things.
Then I can get a better reading of what’s true.” This is the first step. As I’ve already stated, it is far easier to
adhere to orthodoxy. To accept that what
politicians and media figure tell us is the truth. This way lies self deception. The easiest path is invariably the wrong
one. Remember, if something seems too
good to be true or too simple to be true, it usually is. Only by garnering a number of different
opinions can we begin to get something approaching an objective view. This means stepping both to the left and to
the right of the mainstream. If three
different groups agree on the same point it’s fairly certain it is the
truth. On most matters the only thing we
have to rely on is sheer gut instinct.
The unprecedented demonstrations against the war on Iraq showed the limit of mainstream bias. That
people are fully capable of rejecting political orthodoxy when it is clearly
non-sequitous. If we can bring those
same feelings of disquiet to the every day then we can begin to gain that true
reading of which Bill Hicks speaks. With
that we can begin to construct the fair and equitable world which has so far
eluded us.
