Glib Bullshit

A sense of humour is to women what democracy is to neoconservatives. While women may say that they like a man with a sense of humour, what they really mean is that in a choice between Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt with a sense of humour they would choose Brad Pitt with a sense of humour. While neoconservatives say that they value democracy and want to spread it all over the world, what they really mean is in a choice between oil from Saudi Arabia and oil from a democratic Saudi Arabia they would choose oil from a democratic Saudi Arabia.

Thus, despite their claims to the contrary, women apply a strategy of Kissingerian realpolitik to their love lives and neoconservatives go for hunks.

Merry Christmas!

Bring Back Nostalgia

Armistice Day

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.

Citadel del Fouls

I know someone who (if only he had the vocabulary) would call me a champagne socialist. Instead, when he briefs against me he struggles to properly describe the kernel of no-goodness at the heart of my withered soul. He lumbers around near to what he means to say. And he's pretty much got it right. The fullest expression of my ideals would probably be in communism. I imagine a state of affairs where people have a monk-like indifference about the relationship between the nature of the work they do and how much they receive in return. That society's credo would be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". The trouble is that this quixotic dream shrivels in the cold bath of cynicism, apathy and greed that is the rest of my psyche. It is only used for the purposes of buying newspapers and judging others.

(My real politics – after several years studying the subject – may most accurately be termed Foulist-Robotarianism. I may write about that at another time).

In addition to this, I am an atheist. This probably has its origin in early childhood but it has been galvanised more recently by friendships with evangelical Christians. You can take the horse to a Christian Union quiz social but you can't make it accept Jesus as its own personal saviour, as they say. In fact, the horse will be apt to resent any further attempts to make it accept Jesus.

In spite of this I have no trouble imagining what my beliefs would be were I either politically right-wing or religious. For some reason I have well-developed ideas about what I would think and the sort of things I would say that sit in my brain like the developer levels on Goldeneye; unplayable except with a GameShark (I suppose I am using the GameShark here as a metaphor for a life experience that is sufficiently harrowing for it to wholly change my values and beliefs, which is a strange thing to use a GameShark for).

If I were a right-wing sort of person I would think the following things. There is a moral value to hard work and personal responsibility. It is good to get up early. Despite this people should, more often than not, be left to their own devices. High rates of income tax for the very wealthy are not dreadful because most of those guys are Daddys' boys who don't deserve those jobs but it's a pretty raw deal for people who did work their way up. The Royal family do not interest me. Our economy isn't built on social workers. Business and greed are not synonymous. It's good to see someone running their own shop; real pride of ownership; not like these lackeys in the supermarkets. We can't all just be selling each other car insurance; some of us need to make stuff.

Were I a man of religion I would eliminate superstitions as much as possible. No demons, no miracles, no visions, no angels, no ark, no Eden, no virgin birth. God is imminent; he is everywhere and he is everything. In death, we all come to know God, we are God and we are one. No more sui generis Fouls, no more sui generis you. It is blissful; like looking into the sun and it not hurting. The blinkers are off and we know everything. Supreme gangsta shit, we dream gangsta shit. No judgment and no punishment. We know the nature of our crimes and we now ourselves and everyone else.

It's difficult to know what these phantom ideologies are for. The right-wing one definitely has a voice in my head like an unimpressed father. And I feel that I ought to apply his standards about working hard to my own life if not to anyone else's. The religious ideas are perhaps meant to be an aesthetic improvement on my friends' Christian beliefs. They are more modern with sharper lines and a more metallic finish. Perhaps these alternative and unused beliefs exist in preparation for the well-publicised process of a person's views becoming more conservative as they get older.

I got that picture of a (right) wing from a Conservative blog but I had to flip it horizontally... because they'd used a fucking left wing. It was under the heading "What next for the right?"

*Update: having looked at it again I can't tell if that is a right or a left wing. So they may not be idiots.

Three Ways In Which To Become A More Impressive Man

Herewith follows an email that I wrote to a friend over a year ago. It was always intended that this become a blog post but I dared not publish it for fear of my tactics, which I was keen to employ myself, becoming known to those that I wished to use them on. I thought it best, for the sake of transparency, that these now be made public.

1. Walk about eating an apple. Walking about eating an apple is not only impressive but stylish. It is hard not to be impressed by a man who is eating an apple. A man who walks about eating an apple is in illustrious company: in one episode of Hugh’s Chicken Run Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall eats an apple whilst inspecting the hall in Axminster that he uses to launch his Chicken Out campaign. In a podcast, Joe Cornish says he sometimes walks down the street eating an apple and that when he does this he feels superior. You should munch through your apple as if it had the consistency of butter; like a cartoon character would. In reality, people often wear an unsightly grimace when they bite into apples – this is unattractive. Method Of Consumption For The Man Seeking To Impress: pluck your apple from a convenient tree and bounce it deftly off your elbow before taking a crescent shaped bite all the while serenading your lady-prey with an old-timey number such as Just Around The Corner. Later, you will be able to ravish her in a crepuscular setting.
2. Use of the word ‘delight’. As in, “To see you was a delight,” and, “I delight in your eyes.” Or advice, “Let small things delight you: a bright, very clean, check tablecloth; some flowers standing in a blue and white striped mug on the table; that big marmalade cat that came and made confidence to you; the excellent omelette and the carafe of rough wine. How good it all was.”
3. Not wearing a rucksack. Wearing a rucksack encumbers a man. The apple eating is all of a sudden more prosaic. The rucksack-wearer is already too awkward to have the confidence to use the word ‘delight’. Rucksack-wearing has its purposes. If, for example, you have risen early and exercised before heading off to work in a library or wherever you will amplify the feeling of industriousness by wearing a rucksack. Suicide bombers, presumably feel this way when they wear heavily laden rucksacks on the way to Underground stations.