The Responsible Thing

"The other goat, the scapegoat chosen by lot to be sent away, will be kept alive, standing before the Lord. When it is sent away to Azazel in the wilderness, the people will be purified and made right with the Lord."

                                                    Leviticus 16:10

It seems to me that many of the obstacles we human beings face vis-a-vis work, family, relationships, politics, religion etc., are really the result of our failure to accept responsibility for our own actions. After all, why admit and own your mistakes, experiencing personal growth as a result, when it is much easier to blame your failures on the actions of others? Yet if we never take responsibility for our actions, then there is little, realistically, that we can ever do to affect their consequences for the future. Like the man said, those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed forever to repeat them.

Ironically, this is not entirely our fault, but learned behaviour that we been taught since year dot: Woman brought sin into the world, the Jews killed Jesus, immigrants are stealing your jobs. Society's scapegoats are all around us. Then, society shirks its responsibilities like no-one else. Scapegoats provide an endpoint under which all unpleasant truths can be buried. Drug users causes crime, but few dare ask what causes drug use, because then the answer generally comes back as poverty. Drugs are the individual's problem, but poverty is societal, so society takes drug use as its terminus, rather than be in anyway implicated in the inequalities that its poverty perpetuates.

We each trace our problems back until we find a comforting version of reality and then rest on our laurels. By which I mean that we stagnate. When we nominate something as the avatar of all our personal misfortune, we give that avatar immense power over us. For instance, if you consider certain words or images to be blasphemous or profane, then all that anyone else has to do to exert influence over is you is to use those words or images in your presence. No wonder so many people around the world burn the American flag, when it is the only form of retaliation that they have against the ubiquity of US invasion and airstrikes. Why bother with a Predator drone, when you can wound millions of patriotic Americans with little more high-tech equipment than a 50 cent lighter?

The problem with blaming anything on any class of people (women, men, Jews, Muslims, the poor, the young etc.) is that there will always be more of them than there are of you. It's a simple physics problem: a large mass exerts a greater force upon a smaller object than the smaller object does on the larger, proportional to the difference in their two masses. If you're one person seeing a particular demographic of a million or more as preventing you from finding work, then you're never going to find work. Not because of those million others, but from that single malfunctioning thought in your head that has you beat before you even try.

Even worse is what our prejudices tell others about our inner-lives. Most blame and scapegoating is the externalisation of personal faults. If you want to know about a person's personal fears and anxieties, take a look at what they blame on others. Politicians demonise those on benefits, while crying poor and claiming expenses (politicians should be means tested the same as everyone else). Homophobic men are scared that gay men will objectify them in the same way that they objectify women. The guy that tells you certain ethnicities smell is usually the one who could himself do with forming a closer relationship to soap and water.

Moreover, the scapgoater will always be more afraid of the scapegoat than the scapegoat is of their persecutor. Hence, American cops are more afraid of unarmed black men than the other way around, presumably because African-Americans have been subjected to the worst indignities that white America has to offer for 240 years in a row, and they have endured. Like the homophobic man, the racist is ultimately afraid that they will be in treated in the same way that they have treated their victims. For the same reason, heavily armed Israeli settlers, with the full financial and military backing of the government of the United States of America behind them, lose their minds at the sight of a few Palestinian kids throwing rocks. The downside to loading all of your fears onto the shoulders of others is that you tend to become mortally afraid of them out of all proportion to their actual dangerousness. "When you stare into the abyss," as Nietzsche reminds us, "the abyss also stares into you."

Inversely, lack of personal responsibility also leads people to take credit for things in which they had little or no involvement. Look at the British attitude to the Second World War. To listen to people in this country, you'd think Britain defeated Nazi Germany all on its own. Yet 80% of Hitler's forces were defeated by the Red Army, at the cost of twenty million Russian lives. More Soviet troops died at Stalingrad than Britain and America lost during the entire war combined, and it was still only the second biggest loss of life that the Russians suffered (750,000 at Stalingrad, 850,000 at Leningrad). Most of us alive today would not be here without them.

Indeed, if western society was half as civilised as it likes to think it is, you'd think we'd spend as much time commemorating the lives of people that we have killed as we do our own sacrifices. We hold silent vigils to remember the Somme, D-Day, 9/11, but when do we ever fall silent for the victims of Fallujah, Dresden, or the Irish and Indian famines of the nineteenth century that left millions dead thanks to British governmental indifference? The need to shirk our responsibility leads us to dismiss these fallen as enemies that deserve no respect or remembrance, even when they have become our enemy through no fault of their own. We celebrate Olympic victories, Shakespeare's birth, and great British inventions like the world wide web, but when do we ever bear responsibility for Britain's part in the eradication of the hundred million people that lived in the Americas, before Europeans arrived with their guns and their disease? This is not an attitude worthy of a civilised society. A shirker treats other people as they have treated others. The responsible person treats others as they would like to be treated themselves. This is why I could never believe in the death penalty. Isn't one murderer enough? Why should the rest of us become implicated in the crime?

For Britain, Hitler is the ultimate endpoint to negate all else. Hitler killed eight million people, but he's dead now, so you don't need to worry about people like him anymore. That way you can forget that it took thousands of ordinary people to perpetrate the horrors of the Holocaust (and definitely forget about any assistance the Nazis may have received from the IBM corporation). It allows us to sweep all other colonial atrocities under the tiger skin rug, as well as deferring, indefinitely, any discussion about how Stalin virtually defeated Hitler single-handedly, having already killed twenty million of his own people, and what this tells us about the convenient view of the Second World War as a battle of good versus evil. Hitler is also a convenient endpoint because he is just about the only one of the various genocidal maniacs to besmirch the 20th century that Britain didn't support at any point.

I am bound to say at this point, because there are many sensitive and fragile souls that shatter into a thousand pieces whenever anyone expresses an opinion in any way divergent from their own (see Polyphemus and the Myths of Monomania), that of course I am not belittling anything that happened back then. Both my grandfathers fought with distinction in the war. What I am saying is that they had pretty much wrapped it all up 28 years before I was even born. I therefore find it hard to claim any credit for the result, any more than I can claim to be a Petty Officer, just because my dad served in the navy. These are events that occurred independent of my existence. A football crowd may conceivably alter the course of a football match. Claiming credit for something that you didn't bear witness to, and over which you exerted no influence, is tantamount to theft. Or hypocrisy. Either way, the result is unpleasant.

Which only leaves the individual, struggling to make sense of the world. One way is to make others bear the burden for one's mistakes, which only leads to increased feelings of nausea and impotence. Another approach is to recognise that most of what happens in the human sphere of existence is an admixture of judgement and luck. There is little to be done about bad luck. Ill-judgement, on the other hand, can be mitigated against, but it requires the honest assessment of past liability in order to be successful. The most futile lie is the one that we tell to ourselves. A fault can only be corrected if it has been traced back to its proper source. If the source is misidentified, the item will continue to malfunction.

 

Review: The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

One more review.

Review: The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell, who by any standard is one of the leading intellectual figures of the twentieth century. He was one of the very few leading intellectuals who opposed World War I. He was vilified, and in fact ended up in jail, like his counterparts in Germany. From the 1950s, particularly in the United States, he was bitterly denounced and attacked as a crazy old man who was anti-American. Why? Because he was standing up for the principles that other intellectuals also accepted, but he was doing something about it.

                                                                             Noam Chomsky 

There can be few books that have been titled with such wilful understatement as The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell. Any book which includes sections on philosophy, logic, mathematics, linguistics, relativity, education, ethics, psychology, history, politics, religion, metaphysics, epistemology, east/west relations and the future of the human race can hardly be described as basic.

Then again, by the standards of Bertrand Russell, perhaps this is basic. He was a prodigious writer on all of the above subjects and a great deal more and for years I have liberated copies of his many books with titles like Political Ideas, Sceptical Essays, In Praise of Idleness and The ABC of Relativity from second hand book shops.

I like Russell because he thought the things that may people think, but actually did something about them. He was born in 1874 to Lord and Lady Amberley, both of whom died when he was young, and he was raised by his grandmother, Lady Russell, in virtual isolation. It was expected by his elders that Russell would take up a career in politics, but his passion was for mathematics and philosophy. As a member of the ruling classes he could have taken the easy way out, acted as minister in a Liberal government, taken up his seat in the House of Lords, not been a bother to anyone. Instead, he went in the opposite direction, serving time in prison for his opposition to the First World War, being sacked from his professorship at City College in New York for his views on sexual liberation, vociferously supporting the campaign for nuclear disarmament. In 1957, Russell wrote an open letter to both Eisenhower and Khrushchev, calling for an end to the Cold War. Similarly, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he sent telegrams to both Khrushchev and John F Kennedy. Khrushchev assured him that Russia would not be reckless, whereas Kennedy returned his telegram unopened.

Most people would, I think, be glad to have lived half the life that Bertrand Russell lived, displayed half the bravery and understated intelligence that Russell displayed. What comes across from reading this collection of articles isn’t just the sheer depth and breadth of subjects of which Russell was informed enough to talk about, but also serves as reminder that simple ideas and statements sometime need to be reiterated. In my own writing, I often reject trains of thought as they seem so obvious that it would be patronising even to mention them.

Yet simple ideas aren’t always obvious to everyone and even when they are, they bare restatement as a kind of reset button when the world seems to have lost its mind. Russell’s thoughts on religion, politics and education are often simple but never simplistic. It’s worth being reminded that the purpose of education isn’t to teach but to indoctrinate, to question why agnosticism towards God or heaven is any less sensible that agnosticism toward Zeus or Thor, to remind politicians that global conflict is in no one’s best interest except the manufactures of the weapons. Russell never tired of stating and restating his thoughts on these subjects.

Russell’s principal academic pursuits though were in the regions of philosophy and mathematics and there is much in this volume regarding both subjects. Philosophy is often used as a dirty word in the scientific disciplines, yet I think many physicists would benefit from a working knowledge of philosophy, as would philosophers benefit from a little knowledge of basic physical principles. Sadly it is often a case of never, or rarely, the twain shall meet and before Russell, the last significant mathematician-philosopher was probably Rene Descartes in the 17^th century. Russell wrote two major works on the history of philosophy, A History of Western Philosophy and Wisdom of the West, sections from both of which are included here. A History of Western Philosophy in particular has been used as a standard textbook in British institutions for many years and I can highly recommend it for anyone who wants a good overview of the subject, as well as a critical overview of some of the major triumphs and failures in thought of the philosophers in question,  through from Socrates to John Dewey.

For a general overview of the work and thoughts of Bertrand Russell himself however, you could do worse than start with The Basic Writings of… At 736 pages, you certainly get a lot for your money and while you will almost certainly find some of it going over your head (it has taken me three abortive attempts to get past the sections relating to Russell’s Magnus Opus, Principia Mathmatica), time spent with Bertrand Russell is never time wasted. He was a rare breed, of which maybe only the likes of Noam Chomsky or Tony Benn bear comparison. He was politically active right until the end of his life, spending seven days in prison in 1961 for his involvement in anti-nuclear demonstrations at the ripe old age of 89.

Russell died aged 97 on the 2 February 1970, exactly three years to the day before I was born. I would like to have known him, but he left such a plethora of publications that settling for the next best thing isn’t a million miles away from this desire. Our great and prolific writers get read less and less these days. It is our duty to reintroduce them to new generations. There is much that they can teach us.

Get it done.

Best Things Ever #19 Monty Python’s Life of Brian

In deference to its subject matter, this started out as a nice little article about Monty Python's Life of Brian, but then it got silly and went off on a tangent.

Best Things Ever

#19 Monty Python’s Life of Brian

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...

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the true test of great comedy is in its repeat-ability. By that measure, Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a strong candidate for greatest comedy film of all time.

There is hardly a line in Life of Brian that doesn’t bare repeating. While other films, This is Spinal Tap, Withnail & I, Airplane etc.,  can boast of dozens of one liners, most films don’t step beyond the boundaries of the one liner. As a teenager, I was part of a clique that practically communicated in comedy one liners from a dozen films and TV series. Yet the strength of Monty Python was always in their finely crafted sketches and the Life of Brain script represents the Pythons at the top of their game. Virtually every scene is comedy gold and each of our clique had two or three sketches memorised that we would real off for the amusement of each other, like singing karaoke or bashing out the chords to our favourite songs on the guitar. My specialty was always, ‘Crucifixion’s a Doddle’. That and, ‘I Want to Have Babies’.

Beyond its repeatability though, Life of Brian is as good as it is because of its ability to interchange between ribbing religion and side swipes at the mentality of certain sections of 1970s Britain. One has only to think of Michael Palin chained to the wall in Pilate’s prison, shouting ‘nail ‘em up I say’ in reference to crucifixion and see the obvious parallels, even today, to the sections of the media that still want hanging brought back in this country, not out of a sense of justice but because of a thirst, a lust for blood. Or spot the same hypocrisies in the Daily Mail’s recent headlines about unions campaigning for paedophiles in the 1970s, while at the same time carrying countless pictures of underage girls in bikinis on their website. The Daily Mail: For the Self-Hating Paedophile.

Yet Life of Brian as much ridicules the left of the 20^th century. I read somewhere recently that when those on the left talk, they do so in a circle. The problem is that they stand in the same direction when they start firing. The schism between the People’s Front of Judea and the ‘fucking Judean People’s Front’, a hatred way and above the hatred felt for the Romans, perfectly parodies this situation (cf. The Spanish Civil War, where the fascists won because the leftist factions were too busy fighting each other):

Brothers, brothers! We should be struggling together!

We are! Oh!

We mustn't fight each other! Surely, we should be united against the common enemy!

The Judean People's Front?!

No, no, the Romans!

Life of Brain found itself in a lot of trouble for poking fun at religion and is still banned in a number of countries. Yet if Monty Python makes religion look silly that’s because religion kind of is silly. There is nothing in Life of Brain that shouldn’t be obvious to most people, but offense is taken in reminding the faithful that religion is silly, the elephant in the room to which most religious people don’t want attention to be drawn. Likely, it has as much to do with the fact that the one time we do see Jesus, at the beginning of the film, it’s during his Sermon on the Mount speech, which is one of the many bits of the teachings of Christ that you’re supposed to put as far from your mind as possible. If Christianity actually paid attention to the vast majority of the things Christ is purported to have said then Christianity as a for-profit organisation would be unable to function. After all, Christianity is a church dedicated to a man who said don’t go to church. Silly, see.

I’ve heard Anglican clergy that have expressed a love for Monty Python, even for certain sections of Life of Brian, but not for the end, because there’s nothing funny about crucifixion, especially when Christ was crucified. But was he? After all, Acts of the Apostles states that Christ was nailed to a tree and the Book of Galatians says he was hung and then thrown into a tree. The image of Christ crucified is a fairly recent innovation in the history of Christianity. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the fourteenth century, the pilgrims always refer to Christ as the man who was nailed to a tree. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus was tied to a stake and left in the desert to die (or was it yesterdie? – an old Goon Show joke, aw thank yew).

In the original texts, the word translated as crucifix could refer to a number of different punishments meted out by the Romans. I have heard it said that no one was ever crucified using the Latin cross, but rather the Tau or T-shaped cross. The Latin cross was purely ceremonial but impractical compared to the simpler Tau cross, which required less heavy timber. The Latin Cross was a pagan symbol and hanging a cross around your neck is therefore no more appropriate than wearing a pentangle.

There’s also something very fishy about Christ’s crying out at the point of death. Aside from Matthew, Mark and John all giving different versions of what Jesus actually shouted (My God, My God, why hast though forsaken me; Father, I commend myself to your spirit; and, It is done, respectively), the cause of death in crucifixion is by asphyxiation. You suffocate to death due to the fact that all the weight of the body is placed on the chest and lungs. So how could he cry out? Did he fake his death? Did he not come to Earth as a mortal man and was just taking the piss? Or are the gospels just fairy stories, expanded and refined over a century of retelling through the oral tradition, like the tales of Odysseus and the other heroes of Greek myth?

In one sense, Jesus is just another Greek hero. The popular image of Jesus in western art bears no relation to the historical man, if indeed he existed at all. The man we see is in actuality Apollo, the Greek and Roman God of the Sun, reflected by the disc of gold seen behind his head. The Greeks portrayed their gods as having long hair in order to show them as wealthy, in opposition to the shaved heads worn by slaves. Jesus would probably have worn prayer curls at the temples (as demanded by Leviticus, something the Religious Right don’t seem as keen on enforcing as bans on homosexuality). However, the rest of the hair on the head would have been short or shaved.

The Jesus story, including his parents fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod, is very much a retelling of the story of the birth of Apollo and his sister, Artemis, whose mother, Leda, was raped by Zeus and then had to flee the jealous rage of his sister-wife, Hera (as with much of the Bible, the Jesus story is a Greek myth with all of the women excised). And even the name Jesus is a Latinisation of a Greek name Iesous. But ‘Jesus’ was Jewish, so his name would have been Joshua. Ergo, the Jesus so revered in western tradition is really the pagan Sun God, Apollo.

James George Frazer in The Golden Bough notes that in The Gospel According to Luke the soldiers who beat Jesus and place the crown of thorns on his head are described as being Herod’s men. They therefore would all have been Jewish, putting a whole new spin on their mocking of Jesus as The King of the Jews. Frazer believed that rather than being commensurate to the Jewish Passover, the crucifixion took place during the Jewish festival of Haman, a Babylonian ritual or passion play brought back from their time as slaves in Babylonia.

Frazer identified in the crucifixion elements of a Mock King ritual, where one man would be sacrificed to the corn gods, whilst another, the Barabbas (a ceremonial title), would be set free to be executed the following year. Frazer thought that rather than Jesus being special, the ritual was carried out every year during the festival of Haman and Jesus, a troublesome Rabbi who wished to reform Judaism, was brought up on trumped up charges and ritually executed. His theories have a certain ring of truth about them, but who knows how close he came.

The irony here is that Frazer also notes that the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis was never meant to be taken as a literal event that actually happened, but rather an allegory designed to stop child sacrifice amongst the Israelites, a practice which was common in the Middle East and elsewhere at that time. If Frazer’s theories have any truth to them, then it seems Judaism returned to this common practice later on.

(James Joyce puns on Frazer’s Abraham/Isaac theory in the opening page of Finnegans Wake: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac – in other words, before animal sacrifice had replaced the bland/commonplace practice of kings sacrificing their own children.)

All in all then, given the lack of a clear method of execution mentioned in the Bible, the Latin cross not used as a method of execution, the parallels to Greek mythology, the doubtfulness of the descriptions found in the Gospels, as well as James George Frazer’s speculations on the Gospel accounts, I think we’re on pretty safe ground to sing, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ from atop a couple of dozen crucifixes. As with most cries of ‘blasphemy’, what those shouting really want is for no one to think for themselves and have the bleeding obvious pointed out to them. Without frequent recourse to the Church’s various inquisitions, Chrstianity (as I prefer to call it) wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

Life of Brian is also a meta film, a film poking fun at other films about religion and the time of the Romans. ‘I’m Brian and so’s my wife’ is a brilliant parody of ‘I’m Spartacus’. Or the quintessentially British notion of a petty argument about noses going on in the background of one of the most important events in religious scripture (The Sermon on the Mount). If Tom Stoppard had written Life of Brian it would be considered art rather than comedy. Indeed, there is more than a little of Becket and Brecht in Life of Brian. Despite employing an alien space battle as a deus ex machina at one point, which I’ve always suspected was shoehorned in to give Terry Gilliam something to play with, Life of Brian is in many ways the Python’s most serious film as well as their funniest.

Life of Brain is a great film and a great British film exactly because it is so iconoclastic. British comedy, British life in general, has always been about poking fun at authority figures. In the same way that Londoners stood on the banks of the Thames in 1834 to watch and cheer as the Houses of Parliament burned down, so Monty Python gleefully send up religion and politics and British life.

Left to the film industry, Life of Brian would never have been made. It was considered too controversial. Thankfully, George Harrison financed the film and gave birth to Handmade Films in the process, which also came to make Withnail & I, one of the few films that gets anywhere near Life of Brain in terms of quote-ability (I’ll come back to Withnail & I in a later article). The Beatles were falling apart just as the Pythons were coming together. It’s satisfying that it was a Beatle that helped the Pythons stay together just a little longer (although they’d essentially gone their separate ways by this point). The Pythons occupy the same place in the annals of comedy that the Beatles occupy in music.

I rewatched Life of Brian before writing this piece and despite knowing just about every word from start to finish, I was still giggling to myself even as I repeated the lines like repeating the catechism at church. A love of comedy is quite like a fervour for religion. The only difference between religion and comedy is that comedy doesn’t mind admitting that it’s silly.

Get it done.

In Our Present Time

The one edition of In Our Time that you won’t find in the BBC archive.

In Our Present Time

Announcer: And now on Radio 4, In Our Time with Simon Brotherington.

Simon: Hello. I’m Simon Brotherington, standing in for Melvyn Bragg, who’s away this week.

Simon: Joining me to discuss the murder of Julius Caesar are, Dr Julie Craig, Visiting Lecturer in Classical Studies at Woking University; Lawrence Schutt, Emeritus Professor in Roman History at Jordan College, Oxford; and Wendy Clarence, Senior Lecturer in Northern English Roman Studies at Northern University, Bradford.

Simon: Julie Craig, if we can start with you. Can you start by giving us a brief outline of the early years of Julius Caesar?

Julie: Certainly. Gaius Julius Caesar is born around 100BCE, before common era, or before Christ. He’s born to Aurelia Cotta and Gaius Julius Caesar. His family are patricians. They have noble roots, though at this time the family isn’t particularly rich or influential. They...

Simon: Sorry, can I stop you there for a moment. You said Julius Caesar is born around 100BC?

Julie: That’s right.

Simon: But is born? Is born? Surely you mean, was born.

Julie: Sorry?

Simon: Look, unless I’ve massively misunderstood the notes you all sent me, we’re talking about events that happened over two thousand years ago, correct?

Julie: Yes.

Simon: But you’re talking about it like it’s going on now.

Julie: It’s academic convention.

Simon: Well it’s weird. Anyway, I interrupted you. Go on.

Julie: Erm, well, ok, so, his father dies in 85BCE and at the age of 16, young Gaius becomes head of the family.

Simon: See, you’re doing it again.

Julie: What?

Simon: ‘Becomes head of the family’. No, became head of the family.

Julie: I’m sorry.

Simon: Doesn’t matter. Lawrence Schutt, if I can turn to you to move things on a bit. As I understand it, Julius became a priest of Jupiter, where he narrowly escaped death in the purges of the dictator Sulla, so he joined the army and went off to fight in Asia.

Lawrence: That is correct, Simon.

Simon: Ok, so take the story on from there.

Lawrence: Ok, so Gaius joins the army and serves with distinction at the battle of Mytilene, where he is awarded the Civic Crown.

Simon: But see now you’re doing it. This is supposed to be a high class discussion programme. We’re supposed to be educating the listeners about history, not recording a DVD commentary.

Julie: But this is how we always speak. It’s never been a problem when I’ve been on here before.

Simon: You mean it’s not been a problem.

Julie: What?

Simon: Never refers to something that’s not ever happened. Something can’t never have happened before. It has either never happened or it has happened. It’s happening now. So  it can’t never have happened.

Silence.

Simon: Sorry, that just really gets on my tits that. And look, I may not have a PhD in History, but I have at least worked out the difference between the present and the past tense. Wendy Clarence, I hope that you’re going to introduce some sanity into proceedings. Talk about when Julius Caesar was captured by pirates.

Wendy: Erm, so this is in the year 75BCE.

Simon: Was in the year.

Wendy: Sorry, was is in the year 75BCE. Gaius is sailing to Greece to..

Simon: Was sailing to Greece.

Wendy: Was sailing to Greece to continue his studies, when he’s captured err, was captured by Cilcian pirates and held for ransom.

Simon: Good.

Wendy: It is said that when he heard the pirates wanted 20 talons for his ransom, he demands, he demanded, he, he demands, demanded [bursting into tears] that they ask for at least 50.

Simon: Oh good grief. You academics, you don’t like being out of your comfort zone, do you? And now look, it’s nearly the end of the program and we haven’t got anywhere near the murder of Julius Caesar. What do you have to say for yourselves?

Mumbles.

Simon: Pardon?

All: Sorry Simon.

Simon: Worst episode of In Our Time, ever. And I do mean ever.

All: Sorry Simon. Wendy blows her nose and sobs.

Simon: Next week on In Our Time, Melvyn and his guests are, err, will be talking about the history of hostage taking. Thank you very much for listening.

Get it done.

Best Things Ever #18 Bill Hicks: Rant in E-Minor

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.

Get it done.

See also (click link)

Best Things Ever #8 Roadmaps for the Soul: The Music of Bill Hicks