Amazon has a very high opinion of me. This morning they sent me some recommendations for the sort of things they thought I might like to buy. Click on the image to see it larger.
Lacan, Marx, cast-iron dumbbells. Amazon thinks of me as a sort of soviet athlete. A specimen of physical and ideological perfection.
This is not the consumer profile of an ordinary man. These recommendations reflect the purchasing habits of a communist superman.
Not just any old communist superman, though: a communist superman with a keen interest in the life of the human psyche (Lacan) and a pop-culture-informed vision of the perils of totalitarianism (V for Vendetta).
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I have an idea for a news item: Manservant or Master? We start with footage from Jeeves and Wooster, showing how in the olden days it was easy to tell in an instant who wore the spats. Then we explain how these days it can often be hard to tell, gentlemen being apt to conduct their business in flip flops, a vest, jogging bottoms and with a pastiche of the proletarian accent while their valets might go about double-breasted and hatless.
We take two young men – one a gentleman dressed in a yellow H&M cardigan and black and white kiffiyeh, the other his personal gentleman's gentleman decked out in Jack Wills stripey blue shirt and brown shoes – on to the street and ask the public: Manservant of Master?
They all get it wrong! We ask them why they think they it got it wrong. They respond that these days the old markers of dress and accent have broken down. We live now in a world now where it is hard to distinguish between the nobility and the servant class. Most agree that while this can be embarrassing sometimes – when you tip a duke or shake hands with the stable boy – overall, this is a good thing and demonstrates how much fairer we are as a society.
We conclude that this is indeed a brave new world, a new Britain thinly lacquered with equality. The Empire has certainly come along way since the fifties; what will the next fifty years have in store?
This is a rough version of my proposed new advert for the Conservative party. I originally had this idea two years ago.
Ideally, I would like the there to be a sound of cricket ball against cricket bat (to give that familiar 'thock', so redolent of Tory values) rather than the wicket sound that we have at the moment. Also, I think that it would be better without the commentators at the end and more prolonged, polite applause.
If anyone knows where I can find such sounds I would be very grateful if they told me.
Have you heard of James Delingpole? He is a right-wing journalist, author and blogger who specialises in denying man-made global warming and defending the charitable status of private schools. He is in many ways the archetypal absolute cunt; an aristo-fetishistic dickhead and slithery sassenach poster boy for Scottish independence.
But before deriding him in this way, it would be well for me to remember that I am the same me who had watched the TV version of Brideshead Revisited three times by the age of nineteen and who spent my first year at a redbrick university holed up in my room with another slightly posh boy, a bottle of port and cigars as if we were the country's last Old Etonians awaiting the bayonets of the Revolutionary Guard.
Why do I bring up this Delingpole? Well, it is because I have been reading some of his columns along with the columns of his pal Daniel Hannan (the Conservative MEP who caused a stir a few months ago by criticising the NHS on Fox News) and some other Telegraph stuff in order to toughen up my political opinions. It was my hope that by putting my political opinions through a mangle of palatable, broadsheet, centre-right opinion my political opinions would emerge a man.
My political opinions have survived this onslaught of comment quite unscathed but this has nothing to do with their robustness. Were my political opinions founded on rational thought then they might be susceptible to argument. But they aren't; they are founded on a sort of socio-aesthetic taste and are immune to argument. By that wilfully obfuscating, stupid word 'socio-aesthetic', I mean that these are opinions that appeal to me because of their position in society, the other people that hold them, their history and their stylishness. This exposure to the almost reasonable face of conservatism has not changed my beliefs but has caused me to think about how facile those beliefs are and suspect that everyone else's are just as shallow.
It seems to me to be somewhat arrogant to think that you hold your political opinions because you are sufficiently brainy do have divined the best and most fair mode of government. Whatever you think and whoever you are there are probably millions of other, smarter people than you who think something else.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera suggests that political opinions are usually based on a kind of kitsch. What we get passionate about is the particular flavour and associations of our political opinions; their superficial accoutrements.
On further self-examination I think that I barely even hold these superficial opinions. Mainly, I don't give a shit about anything at all. Having spent most of their lives in leafy, cosseted childhood, exposed to the real world my wispy, effete opinions might easily be devoured by that dark spectre of downward social mobility.
It is fitting therefore that my conclusion on Delingpole (who elsewhere has been dealt pure vitriol and been dubbed a twat) is utterly trivial. He appeared recently on a remarkable documentary called When Boris Met Dave talking about his Oxford days; days he seems to be having trouble getting over. He was roundly mocked as a Sebastian Flyte wannabe and he accepted all this with good humour and oh-so-British self-deprecation.
I am not above warming to a bit of self-deprecation and, as I explained above, I have some understanding of the potent effect of Brideshead on a certain kind of teenage brain. So my trivial conclusion is that he is a ponce with something other than bien pensant liberal views but basically clubbable.
And I have learned that I have no opinions worth talking about (notwithstanding Foulsist Robotarianism). So fuck.
I am so full of shit these days. I don't just mean this blog. It used to be that I would be honest in my communication; now it's all "good to hear from you!", "really well done!", "have a good time!", "we should meet up soon": such shit. That's changing from now on.xx
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A few weeks ago I was on a train, nice pair of seats to myself, looking out the window. A jakey woman came by asking for a lighter, I told her that I didn't have one. She took a better look at me, reeled and then said, "I recognise you," waggling her finger at me. She said she had seen me walking around; she recognised me by my walk, she said. Then she did an imitation of my walk by limping around and sticking one shoulder up to her ear.
She reeled a second time, this time more violently and pointed an accusing finger at me, for a moment too astonished to speak, "You were in Star Wars!" Initially, I denied this but she persisted and I admitted that, yes, I was in Star Wars. She said that my secret was safe her, evidently recognising my desire to remain incognito – all of this audible to the rest of the carriage.
She resumed her hunchback pose and said that she could remember one of my scenes. She quoted, "I may be deformed, captain, but that doesn't mean I'm not intelligent." She went on to recall how I had been a pioneer for disabled actors, a beacon of sorts.
Throughout all of this I was continually affirming her statements, "That's right," I was saying. Eventually, she became bored and walked off.
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I've changed the way comments work on this blog. We're now using something called Disqus that allows you to integrate with Facebook and Twitter and so on. It's the same as what Limmy's done: I've copied Limmy. You can try out if you like, I don't know if it works or how it will show up on Facebook.
Also, I think that if you get yourself a Gravatar you'll have a wee image with your comment.
I've changed my mind about something. While studying a Social Policy module at university I discovered that the government now refers to people who claim benefits as 'customers' as opposed to 'claimants' or 'recipients'. This is an example of New Labour's mania for translating everything into the language of commerce. This tactic may originally have been a way of selling social democratic policies to people who would who would not have voted for Labour prior to 1997 but that purpose has been forgotten and such words serve to propagate free market ideology.
Or so I thought! On Wednesday, I went to a Back To Work session at the Job Centre Plus. It was a PowerPoint presentation given by a woman who explained that the session is a new government wheeze and attendance is compulsory for everyone on Job Seeker's Allowance. She rattled through it very quickly and I became disproportionately annoyed when anyone prolonged the experience by asking questions.
She referred to us as 'customers' throughout as per the JCP jargon. In this context the word seemed to inculcate the idea that the JCP was a place that provided us – customers – with a service. The JCP is not simply an office for signing on. The focus is on getting a job not on getting free money.
A 'customer' sounds like someone with rights, someone to be treated with respect. So while putting the emphasis on the search for work as opposed to claiming money, the use of the word 'customer' does not force responsibilities on us; it helps direct us towards responsibilities – possibly this is consistent with all that Nudge shit.
The word 'customer' is not as stigmatising as a word like 'claimant'. In a capitalist society such us ours it is the customers who are important; if the 'claimants' are not 'customers' then they are something else. They are apart, they are needy, and they have taken enough already – we owe them nothing.
I would rather be a customer than a claimant. So all of you sitting there in your fucking ivory tower universities, getting your fancy degrees, listen to this lesson from the university of life!
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You're not allowed to do work experience while you're on JSA. I think that I need more work experience to have any chance of getting the sort of jobs that I'm after. You can do voluntary work but not work experience.
The Tories, of all people, are considering changing this for the under 25s. The government says that the tax payer ought not to be paying for weeks of unpaid work; the company should pay. But in the absence of any legislation that says that companies must pay interns and when hardly any companies pay interns, internships are too costly for most people. Certain jobs, particularly in the media, are for this reason off-limits for people whose parents cannot support them while they are not being paid.
On JSA you are required to do three 'things' a week to look for work. It would be quite easy to be doing more than that while also doing work experience. There could also be an understanding that you would stop your work experience if offered paid work.
I bought a poppy last week. It's been a few years since I last wore one. I attach some thoughts to it: none of remembrance, I'm afraid; all of vanity. One is a worry that it might mark me as a member of the Countryside Alliance as I walk around south London and through art galleries. Another is that it makes me feel like the prime minister.
Today, I went to observe the two minute silence in Trafalgar Square. Stephen Fry had tweeted that he would be reading a couple of poems there and I hurried down imagining an affair of glitzy solemnity: black coats, men in uniforms, a brass band, actors, comedians and politicians.
But that wasn't the only reason I was drawn there; I had been missing the remembrance services we had at school. They were led by the man whose face (browser permitting) should accompany this paragraph (I think they continue to be led by him to this and, indeed, on this day). He is the school's principal. I remember once Mrs Denyer instructed certain year groups to stand and for the rest of us to imagine them all slaughtered to demonstrate visually the number of former pupils of the school who had died in the first world war or both world wars or all wars ever: six hundred or so.
Each year it was the same. I looked forward to the service because it offered a good hour and a half off lessons. I was then (and will always be) quite prepared to put up with any amount of boredom if it means not working. Those would be my feelings going into the service but during its course I would be built up by prayers, readings, hymns, poems, the gravity of the assembly hall, and multimedia presentations about former pupils of the school who died in war: by the time the bugler played the Last Post outside somewhere I would be feeling emotional, gripped by some abstract grief.
It was a fix of this sort that I expected to find in Trafalgar Square. I arrived just after ten. GMTV's Ben Shephard was onstage in his role as emcee. He introduced Mark Knopfler who played a boring song (all proceeds to the British Legion) and Athlete who played two more awful, boring songs. Their lead singer, Joel Pott, spoke in between the songs and had semantic trouble with the word 'lay': he had visited Arnhem where his grandfather 'lay', had lain wounded, he clarified.
All this was very disappointing. I tried to restrain within me the great power of my snobbery but this show seemed so tawdry. I looked around the crowd in search of noble sentiments, presumably a great number of these people were bereaved, but they just looked like any old milling crowd and where was the brass band? And whose idea had it been to hire this bloody insipid Ben Shephard? Why wasn't this thing being led by some grand patrician bishop or former general? Where was the nation's headmaster?
Out came Fry. He wore a nice coat and read In Flanders Fields followed by Suicide in the Trenches. An articulated truck had drawn attention with a loud parp of its horn while the poems were read; the bugle soon provided better parpery. During the silence sirens wailed continuously. A cat squawked and so did a bird. Camera shutters were audible from twenty yards away.
Then back to the show. Shephard began talking via a nineties-style 'link up' to the emcee of a similar event in Swansea. He made some reference to being us being 'up in London' and them being 'down in Swansea'. The other emcee was perhaps taken aback by Shepherd's archaic usage for he seemed to pause before responding and looked offended.
I had in mind a swift getaway and struck out towards Charing Cross station but the great tide of the people was not heading that way; they were moving to drop paper poppy petals in the more westerly of the square's fountains. I took some petals from a box and went with them. Some people lingered by the fountain after they had scattered their poppys and watched them float around. Here was something that was not to be found in those school services: actual grief. I felt guilty. Both my grandfathers fought in the second world war but for them, as far as I know, it was a great adventure. A non-fatal great adventure. My family has not lost anyone in war. I jettisoned my poppys into the water and made room for the bereaved.
I walked down Whitehall. A large crowd around the cenotaph was dispersing. Thunderous applause was emanating from the Foreign Office. I walked into Parliament Square and past the war protest there. Iraq: two million dead. Twice the number of British deaths in the first world war. Not true, apparently, but not far off.
Larry David plays Gordon Brown in a new comedy. Sarah Brown is played by Cheryl Hines.
Excerpt: In this scene Gordon and Sarah are talking in the kitchen of their palatial Santa Monica home. Sarah has a copy of the Sun newspaper and is dismayed by the front page.
Gordon: [Eating a yoghurt] Mm! You know Lewis' new girlfriend makes these. Very tasty. Pretty... pretty...
S: It's an English newspaper. It says that you insulted the mother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan.
G: Whaaaat? Give that here. [Gordon takes the paper and examines the front page, muttering to himself for a moment] Oh this is bullshit! I insulted her? Bullshit!
S: Larry, why would you insult the mother of a soldier who died...
G: I didn't insult her. I wrote her a letter offering my condolences – which I do for all the close relatives of members of the armed services who die in action, by the way – and now she's saying that because my handwriting is bad she's insulted.
S: [Examining the scanned copy of the letter in the Sun] Larry, this is horrible, look at all the spelling mistakes and your handwriting is just awful.
G: I've got one eye! Of course it's fucking bad. You know how many of those things I have to write, two soldiers die in Afghanistan every week!
S: So you begrudge writing them?
G: No, I didn't say that. [Shaking his head furiously] It's a nice gesture, I think. I don't mind doing it. This is such bullshit, you can't criticise a polite gesture. You should be thankful for the gesture, thankful.
S: Well, I think you should phone this woman and apologise.
G: Phone her? Uch.
S: Larry! This woman has lost a son, you've insulted her...
I've started a little Spotify playlist. You can get to it by clicking that link that says 'Spotifouls' up the top there... or on this blue phrase: ménage à une. Perhaps, by listening to the music there, you will be able to unravel some small part of the mystery of my sphinxy brain.
I wrote the bulk of this on May 24 just after I finished my university final year exams but I didn't post it. Today, I finished it off. And now, after all these months, you get to read it, Larry, you sick fuck.
It it with some guilt and trepidation that I proceed to put forward what I fear will be trite and pretentious so-called 'reflections' on the character of the angst of young people with comfortable upbringings as they confront a new section their lives. However, the angst felt by amateur bloggers is, if possible, less compelling so I had better get over this and proceed.
One thing that people seem to be concerned with is the extent of the command over the world's resources that they expect to be afforded by the various employments that are in prospect for them. A fellow graduand predicted that, in seven or so years, he would be compensated for the application of his knowledge of English law with goods amounting to an equivalent of eighty thousand pounds every year. Others were disposed to compare the scale of their annual consumption now (typically around half of an average British income) to conservative estimates of the remunerations prevailing in the industries to which they proposed to hire their labour power. Many expected that the increase in income would lead to an unprecedented capability to acquire consumer electronics and a relaxed attitude towards restaurant bills.
It was not thought that the future would be unambiguously better than the present. Quantity of resources is only one of a plurality of criteria by which future well-being may be measured. A colleague was grimly confident that he would never again be able to down tools and go outside to enjoy fine weather.
Intense work of the kind required for university finals leaves no time for reflection. It requires concentration on specifics; broader concerns are forgotten; as is the inevitability of death. The period after a time of intense work thus encourages mild catatonia and a heightened awareness of mortality. It is often said that young think that they will live forever. They may claim to fully acknowledge that we all will certainly die but they do not give that fact the proper attention in their thoughts and actions.
And, indeed, I find it difficult to believe that it is so certain that I will die. It has not yet been conclusively demonstrated that I, you and anyone else now alive will ever die. Of the 90-110 billion people that have ever lived, it has not been shown that 6.67 billion are mortal. The same is true of all the world's plants, fungi and other members of animal species living now. Several of my ancestors have not died. As such there may be a genetic precedent for my immortality. A critic might point out that all of my ancestors who have not died are the ones who have been most recently born. Furthermore, they constitute a vanishingly small fraction of the group of people to whom I owe my genetic inheritance. Most of them have shown themselves to be susceptible to the process of cell-death and corruption evinced in the ageing process.
But then I certainly feel immortal. I remember remarking to my mother when I was about five that while I realised that I had only been around for about five years, it felt like forever to me. I feel much the same way now. Also, as I consider my future, I am only in a position to prepare for or conceive of the next year or so. I may live for much longer than a year, it may as well be eternity.
What would eternal life be like? Very bad, say some, notably Ronnie the Bear who, in Wizard People, Dear Reader, declaims against heaven, calling it "the sick bed of pansy lies":
Far better "to live in the flesh and blood of the now" than to dwell on the possibility of cowardly dreams of infinite life. Dicky Dawkins takes a similar line, saying that he would like two to three hundred years but no more.
He imagines that such a period of time would be sufficient to be hailed as a Númenórean overlord provided that it was only he that enjoyed such a span of life. I think that four or six hundred years would be necessary for such a plan, something that he will perhaps realise in time. In this endeavour he will, of course, be well served by his knowledge of genetics; doubtless he could adapt his body for expiry at three hundred but leave open the possibility for extension of a further three hundred years when he reached two hundred and fifty. I wish him well.
I am quite happy with the idea that I might live forever. Given the likely progress of matter into drifted-apartness and entropy most of this eternal life would be spent floating alone in space; I would need to have plenty of interesting things to think about; maybe I would extend my immortality to some books and DVDs. That is unless you subscribe to the theory of the oscillating universe: big bang, big crunch, big bang, big crunch, big bang, big crunch ek setru. In fact, if the universe does oscillate then the theory of the oscillating universe is true whether you subscribe to it or not; why you ever thought that your weak-minded opinions have an effect on material reality I do not know. You're just an egotist like the rest of them, I guess.
A few months ago we all get very excited when Charlie Brooker used his programme Newswipe to bring to our attention Fox News' Glenn Beck and his foaming-at-the-mouth ways. Prior to that I had been aware of Bill O'Reilly but Brooker opened the door to a rich and varied world of right-wing, polemical, broadcast-maniacism. Here's a video of it - the Beck bit starts at 3.25:
Since then I've come across Beck on YouTube a few times and often he did seem every bit as nutty as he was on Newswipe. But (this is my big scoop, by the way) I think that Brooker (very slightly) misrepresented him. Beck has a sense of humour. In July, the Emmy award-winning, former Saturday Night Live writer and performer Al Franken became a senator - here is Beck's reaction:
"You don't want me as a senator!" Check it out! He knows what he is, he knows he's a crazed, current affairs jester.
Here he is talking to Telegraph blogger and libertarian conservative journalist James Delingpole (skip to 1.19):
Look at those two carrying on; having a rare time, so they are. I think it might be fair to say that each take neither themselves nor each other very seriously, or, at least, they don't take themselves seriously all the time. Comedy was captured by the left in the eighties; to go on telly and display humour even in the merest way must be very gratifying for someone on the right.
Beck is not a comedian but there is a undercurrent to his show and his presentation style that is knowingly frivolous. I doubt that he would be at all surprised at what your average European leftie would make of him.
Don't get me wrong – how dare you even think of getting me wrong! - he is reasonably crazy and doubtless he'll poison a few minds but really he is a distraction. Probably, we should be more concerned about the fact that Rupert Murdoch, by dint of having money, has been able to pollute much of the world's media with his Palpatinite agenda.
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Bonus features
Here is a video of Al Franken (the senator/comedian I mentioned earlier) talking universal healthcare or, as Rich Fulcher put it, "This is Al Franken doing what a Senator should do: kick raw ass and take raw names!"
And because the Fouls Tribune is Fair and Balanced why not read Christopher Hitchens being critical of him, in an article I haven't fully read, here.
