This is Reality.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000k94k

Over the twelve or so years we’ve been watching ourselves in reality TV progs like TOWIE, Made in Chelsea etc etc we’ve been learning, not just about life in Essex and Chelsea but how to perform in our own reality. This is Reality. The above radio series lays this progression out beautifully. Though the producers of these shows explain, ‘These are real people in real situations with real emotions’, the finished product is manufactured to a brief. This is Reality. But the emotions are real otherwise, “it would all just be very bad acting”. In these twelve years the mostly young audience have been drifting towards seeing life in these terms. Sure you might be “not from New York city you’re from Hunters Bar”, but the emotions are real, which they are, and emotions are universal, right. The rest is now accepted as pretty fake. This is Reality. So one is left watching a merry dance of entertaining emotions and one begins to accept that emotionally is ‘how life is led. This is Reality. Well yes it is for some people but most, under the slings and arrows of experience, gain a maturity that puts reality first. It’s a,‘If you don’t rule your emotions your emotions will rule you’ kind of thing. (they’re formed in the reptilian part of the brain) This performing emotively in your own reality is appropriate for soaps but it’s become so pervasive in America few American actors can play big roles requiring real character depth so they often turn to English actors. And if that’s the effect it has on actors ordinary people can’t be far behind. This is Reality. Sure it is but it’s a fake reality. With thanks to Donald Glover. This is Reality. Dope.

Black Lives Matter.

Yesterday I was dismissed as being a white, heterosexual male, the most privileged group in our society. Most British fathers I know are and I find it nothing to be apologetic about. But women have ‘me too’, homosexuals have gay pride and now ‘black lives matter’. We’re the only social group left that doesn’t have a social media victim banner. And we’ve missed the boat on that one. ‘Proud white fathers’ would probably be met by universal derision, though I’m still proud to be the father of three. I was accused because I introduced some nuance into the BLM debate. That nuance apparently indicated I wasn’t 100% behind it. I find that strange. Nuance is only thinking, peeling the onion, finding complexities, implications and different perspectives. It’s definitely not being an apologist. I would be failing my privileged education to do otherwise. And white America takes some peeling. They arrived as immigrants around 1600 and in the next two hundred years decimated the indigenous native Indians, and the British slave trade supplied the southern states with free black labour until 1865. White America is built literally on stolen land, slave labour and stolen birth rites. As a result they hold a deep fear of the ghosts of those barbarian deeds. Hopefully BLM can make a difference. But how? In rodent experiments researchers gave rats drugs. They got high and aggressive, the rats that is. The researchers then gave the rats activities to do and the rats stopped using the drugs even though they were still freely available. Blacks even after gaining liberty remained poor, poorly educated and with high unemployment for generations. Gee Officer Crupky sums it up beautifully. They along with native Indians and poor whites become ‘trouble’ that ‘must be policed.’ Yet many live good lives and, given opportunities, prosper. Given all this BLM demos and knocking down old statues, in the UK at lest, seems a cost-free comforting emotion, a Facebook emogie. What’s needed is empathy, better education, opportunities and employment. In this pandemic some rough sleepers were housed in unused uni halls of residence and an unexpected almost miracle occurred. They dropped their alcohol and/or drug habit naturally. You might say they were re-civilised by their surroundings. Rogers would say it’s our natural inclination to grow. But that growth costs money, time and effort far more than a demo and knocking down statues. So are we prepared to give our money, time and effort to people who, in many cases, are angry, belligerent and telling us to fuck off? Statues don’t do that.

The Great Reduction.

Our brains are amazing. Countless synapses, countless more pathways, unfathomable complexity and subtlety. Why then do we typically use them in mundane simplistic mode? I’m not talking about picking up a cup of tea, that in the scheme of things is pretty complex, I’m talking about judging simplistically, black or white, profit or loss, rich or poor that even a tree would be ashamed of. I say a tree because science has shown their roots are connected over large areas by fungi that helps them pass nutrients from strong to weak, older mothers to younger saplings to ensure the health of all; a World Wide Web combined with a National Health Service, all done silently and seamlessly under our feet. And this generosity is across all species. Nature has countless pathways of unfathomable complexity and sublime subtlety. Yet we just see a tree, $200, a cow, £150, an acre of land, £2,000 and so on in a reduction of breathtaking simplistic stupidity. Commoditisation at this level misses all subtlety. Matchbox toys, a company I once worked for, borrowed to expand but became so over-geared it couldn’t pay the interest even in good years, and went bust. Experienced engineers became insurance salesmen, one got a fish round, another sold double glazing. A vibrant ecosystem of skill and friendship died, corrupted by accountants. Schools have also been corrupted by numbers. What was once an enjoyable mutually creative endeavour has become a fearful scrabble for a league table position. Another ecosystem corrupted by simplistic accountancy. Whatever we do in the name of numbers corrupts because of its gross simplicity. Where old forests flourish neat rows of conifers grown for profit become diseased like cows and chickens, and if Britain measures us by GDP we won’t flourish either, and neither will our GDP. And now this pandemic is attempting to destroy the many million small ecosystems under our feet that bind us together in countless unfathomable ways. Jobs, sport, pubs etc, all gone in weeks like rows of ailing conifers stoically standing two meters apart. This great reduction, our reliance on crude simplicity to underpin our judgements of value stubbornly remains as driftwood to cling to having forgotten how to use our brain’s ‘countless synapses, even more pathways, unfathomable complexity and subtlety.’ And luckily Coronavirus has give us six months to think about it. We must surely become gardeners of ourselves not accountants of all we survey. Now think of a bank statement and then listen to this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC3GrzoQG9U

“Sorry it’s Company Policy.”

Do you know that helpless hopeless feeling when some nebulous authority says there’s nothing you can do but capitulate? Now history. Back in the 1600’s Europeans invaded the Americas, the homeland of its countless resident Indian tribes. These noble explorers set about carving their future in the face justifiable resistance from the Indian inhabitants. There was a sort of corporate sensibility within the incomers, a feeling of being ‘other’ in this new country. They decided they were superior and the redskins were savages. Only by this trick of branding could the incomers justify their despicable behaviour as good and acceptable efforts to ‘civilise’ them, as opposed to killing and pillaging which would have felt very upsetting. After a hundred years of being brutalised, lied to and corralled the majority of Indians have become demoralised, subdued and constrained into ever diminishing reservations. America is now white and still policing a poverty stricken Indian population ravaged with drug and alcohol problems, and thus justifying this result as, “they brought it on themselves”. But basically they were screwed by the incomer’s ‘company policy.’ Aborigines in Australia, Indians in India, Palestinians in Palestine all screwed by the same branding and conveniently justified by, ‘sorry it’s company policy.’ And African blacks transported, traumatised and sold for the strength of their backs. They also had that same, ‘helpless hopeless feeling when some nebulous authority said there’s nothing you can do but capitulate’ in the face of some foreign governmental ‘company policy.’ Individually we also do it. “I hit her because she was asking for it”, “I did it to teach him a lesson”, “she had it coming” etc, all justifications for actions that would otherwise sully our own rosy view of ourselves. We too can think “they brought it on themself” and conveniently overlook the part we played in causing their perversity. This for me is the root of prejudice. ‘We’ unilaterally made the rules of engagement that ‘they’ must play by. That these rules appear just and fair is no tribute to our justness and fairness but rather our inability to appreciate the difference of others. That we rule by them is the very definition of unfairness, which then produces a perverted history, a mistake in the knitting pattern that at some point must be carefully unpicked and put right; no easy thing when generations are involved, and the generality exists under a mass of individual differences. Are ‘they’ Marcus Rashford, Stormsy or a drug gang member? Are we David Attenborough, Tracy Emmins or a drug gang member? And how many generations have we been in the making? We are all in parts family, opportunity, personal quality and luck, thought the latter is mostly dependant on the former. Families we must foster, opportunities provide, personal qualities must be judged fairly, and trust to luck. And wealth? In these terms it’s immaterial but in terms of its capacity to grossly deform the structure and well being of society it has no equal. It’s the very essence of the, ‘nebulous authority that says there’s nothing you can do but capitulate.’

Sound Economic Principles.

It appears to make so much sense. Most industries from air travel to corner shops are powerless against their rising debts. It’s as if time itself needs constant feeding £’s. A theatre for example plunges into the red. It’s a 100% going proposition except for no audience. It could continue its income stream in two weeks if that audience returned, but right now it’s bankrupt, like a TV you can’t keep up the payments on. It’s ready for the bailiffs. It’s purchased at a knock down price and the new owner plugs it back in. It’s no wonder Jacob Reece Mogg considers this pandemic to be a once in a lifetime opportunity. It’s supported by our public money as far as possible until the inevitable happens. We’re left paying off the debt, accepting lower wages and conditions and, if we have any cash left, buying tickets for its new production of The Merchant of Venice. And it’s all based on sound economic principles. So how come our ‘sound economic principles’ can lead to the biggest land-grab in history? Meanwhile Black Lives Matter and the statues of slave traders are torn down. Do we know something we don’t know we know? Are we all being bought and sold in some secretive existential slave auction? And dying in thousands to boot. If it hasn’t been the story line of a Bond movie already it should be. The filthy rich want even more money and the world to themselves to spend it in. See Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, circa 1930’s. I haven’t read it but quoted it enough times. So maybe viruses are the new thing to get you what you want, like plastics. I calculated the amount of plastics in existence once. It was countless billions of tons because every ounce of plastic since 1950 is still here somewhere. (360 million last year alone) So maybe there’s something wrong with our human understanding of ‘sound economic principles’. For sure cats don’t abide by it.

When I was born we had none of these.

Yesterday I was spurred into recalling my own brief three-quarter century of history. In my grandparent’s soot-blackened terraced house I was tin-bathed and outside-toileted. I remember street men, knife sharpeners, rag and bone men, men selling sugar and salt carved from blocks, milk and muffins, poes under the bed and sitting by their cast-iron range till my legs got red raw, school and Sunday school. We were good Lancashire mill workers, Methodists with no swearing or alcohol. My mother could lip-read because of the noisy looms and probably glowed in the dark from licking radium tipped paint brushes illuminating watch faces as war work. Car ownership was twenty years off, it was walk, cycle or bus. There was a radio with, for some inexplicable reason, odd foreign places like Luxembourg and Hilvers on the dial. Wages must have been around £5 a week, houses £300 and there was rationing. I was born chubby but soon leaned out. No one had a waist measurement over 32” except the mayor. By the time I was five things were on the up and by fifteen, 1958, I had a second hand bike, £3.50, we had a back and front garden, an ancient wooden garage and a black and white television, but my mum still wrote all weekly expenditures in a book. And then and then, and then now. And ‘now’ is both amazing and frightening, luxurious and wasteful, permissive and puritanical, comfortable and stressful, connected and disconnected, concerned and confused. Could our brains have been heated up by the lead in petrol or it’s toxic substitutes? A more prosaic explanation might be the Monte Carlo effect. In Monte Carlo they’re so wealthy they’re left with only their whims to consider, a sort of self-incestuousness. In a recent documentary on this wealth haven an oik had a T shirt emblazoned with, ‘Don’t make friends make money’. As well as being out of date before he was born, it somehow proves his only friend is money, which as everyone knows is the only remaining friend to those who have lots of it. So have we all over the years become to some extent self-incestuous? In short, American? Most likely. We can’t watch TV without its mandatory 15 minutes of lessons every hour, magazines with pages of them and now an internet dedicated to them. When I was born we had none of these.

Pillory Me.

This ‘tear down statues’ thing has made me re-examine my own past and it’s not pretty. My parents and grandparents worked in Manchester’s cotton mills profiting from the cotton picked by slaves. I myself felt proud to be a Scout leader for a short time, a movement lead by Baden Powell who has been labelled a Nazi sympathiser and racist. My parents were in the war effort under, a long way under, Winston Churchill, a man with dubious family connections. I personally made a lot of money out of American children’s pocket money. And finally I currently buy cloths and many other goods from high street chains made by children in far east sweat shops. Maybe even my pride in being British is misplaced. At least I didn't vote for Brexit and the Conservatives. Yes I’ll miss the bronze reminders of our British past, being able to read the plaque and mutter, “Scum” but in truth it would only be to heap on their heads my own smaller profiteering from those of lesser circumstance. And if I refuse to buy from Primark it will only lower the workers wages, as if they aren’t too low already. In the end I feel I must admit to being born into a species, I suspect the only species that knows the concept of slavery. And of shame, duplicity, usury, nobility and greed without end. These are my ultimate regrets. But then we can cherish, love, laugh, care and create amazing art and science: We’re not all bad. No, the past is always a mucky place just as this present will become in the years ahead, each one to be judged for our human failings and successes. The rich will be pilloried and envied in equal parts, but the past, if erased or cleansed, will not be there to lean from.

Covid Emotionally Speaking.

I sense we’re feeling emotionally attacked by this pandemic. It’s become a background bully, miasmic and impersonal, a constant frightening odour we can’t discern the source of. So in a conscious search for a culprit we just become emotional and attach it to some one or something we can be emotional at. Emotions are like that. They’re just there and our conscious attributions to them are, well quite frankly irresponsible. But we do it anyway. Domestically, governmentally, even racially we’re attaching this growing Covid emotional miasma believing they are the true source of our feelings. I for one can’t stand the icy interruptive white female voice of BBC 4’s morning news, I want to stab her with her own icicles. And now the brown smirk-faced professor on Piers Morgan’s morning inflammation who wants to tear down all our bronze historical figures on account of they were imperfect. Sorry fella history’s like that. The only way to be perfect is to do nothing. To imagine we automatically admire every bronze man on a plinth is simplistic. Mostly we just think, “Man on plinth, nice sculpture”, but even if we read who he is, ‘Best UK slave trader, 1795’, we don’t think, “Mmm nice idea!, why didn’t we cover that on my MBA.” So maybe as time goes on we’re becoming increasingly the victims of Corvid induced emotions and our consciousness's inability to sort the wheat from the chaff. If you find yourself crying or your homelings making you consider divorce I suggest you shout, ‘Fuck you Coronavirus’ as loud as possible. I do seriously wonder if emotion will be the demise of humans though. In one Star Trek episode Captain Kirk sent his crew out to get the dead body of an ex crew member while, wait for it, being attacked by numerous ferocious 30 foot animated telegraph poles. “An unfortunate decision Capen” said Spock. “That’s the difference between us Spock, we have feeling, we’re not just logical like you” Kirk replied. Thanks only to the script writers no one else died but I certainly wouldn’t fancy my chances against even one 30 foot animated telegraph pole.

Time to watch Metropolis Again.

Stock markets up, Prospects down.

Strangely stock markets are still rising as the whole world goes into recession. Very odd. If you have a pension or investments the people who look after them are very keen to make your pot grow, otherwise they’d be out of a job. TINA stands for ‘There Is No Alternative’ meaning the only game in town is stock markets. Basically a huge amount of cash is chasing the best return and as that’s the stock market it’s driving prices up. I’m trying to get my head round it all by typing this. OK but shares are in companies that are busy trying to survive, laying people off and closing plants etc, and we’re all acquiring ever more titanic government debts by the day. I have to say this smacks of Trumpian economics; ‘This is going to be great- invest in me- Oh sorry, unforeseen problems- I’m off- thanks for the cash.’ I imagine he’s currently working on some Martian real-estate scam. So what does the future look like? Mmm, scratch. I think we’ve created a system where the old adage, ‘the rich get richer and the poor etc’ has gone into overdrive: A sort of aggressive slavery (slaves aren’t always black) where the poor, however hard we work, become more indebted and the rich reap the benefits of our labour AND the interest on our debts. Of course this is unsustainable and probably the underlying reason for the current mass demonstrations. Mmm, another scratch. So what can be done? OK what did the black slaves do? Oh this is even more depressing. They couldn’t do anything, and those that did got strung up. They were categorised as lesser beings and subject to different disadvantageous rules. Their subservience was treated with abject fondness and their objections as ‘thugery’ in Preti and Boris speak. It’s the same old ‘ruling logic.’ So? It’s all a jigsaw puzzle where the picture shows ‘Home sweet home’ but the pieces have been rammed into reading ‘Homo swet heet me’. Not great but I am making this up as I go along. So now I’m seeing the working poor demonstrating, six abreast, together in a slow deliberate swaying march like that classic old film Metropolis. It looks hugely intimidating; an organised, unstoppable mass of bodies. No random, disjointed, frenetic, outwardly aggressive milling crowd, just unstoppable. Not leader and followers just homogenous humanity. It would make a great graphic too. We’ll get Stormzy to do the music. Interestingly Fritz Lang’s original screenplay for Metropolis was altered in the American version to show the down trodden workers as the villains. Surprised?

Privilege Matters.

Just watched an American video; a field, a line of young people, a man saying “if …...take 2 steps forward.” The questions were about your start in life, parents married, often hungry, that sort of thing. It was pretty clear by ten or so questions the disparity of starts, the poor at the back, the comfortably off at the front. It was also clear there was a bias towards black people at the back. Of course there are many famous people who had poor starts and made something of themselves and others who squandered good ones, but the majority are profoundly influenced by it. Poverty causes stress which in turn causes family arguments and break up. It provokes lawlessness in an attempt to make ends meet and promotes anger and fear in equal parts. But again it sometimes doesn’t. It often limits one’s horizons and possibilities leading to the helping hand of alcohol and narcotics. But often the reverse is true. And in time there arises simplistic labels that in no way truly reflect the individual. So what is Black Lives Matter a response to? Poor parenting, poverty, skin, race, the dubious validity of law versus lawlessness, prejudice? For me it’s the destruction of human values by overbearing deviate states. We want almost viscerally a good home, loving parents, equality and fareness, understanding enough for a decent life, if fact the return of decency itself. Maybe Black Lives Matter is a French revolution of sorts, a fight for universal privilege. If that’s the case Donald, Boris and Dominic had better take heed.

A Very British F-up.

It’s actually happening, running its course, like a nose. We have a class system, obviously, as exemplified by the famous pre-Monty Python, “I look up to him…..but down on him” sketch. Upper - Middle – Lower or Public school - University - State school or Nanny/Mother – Mum - Ma. I’ll omit the colonials though they did a jolly good job in the war. This breaks down to one’s use of; privilege - intellect – cunning, which in turn is exemplified by who one runs to in times of trouble; nanny/matron (paid professional carer) – mother (unpaid harasser) – ma (jovial unpaid sporadic harasser). So this is how the British F-up runs. To begin with we’re all led by the Upper class as they have the bravado and necessary cash but lack the competence and experience. As they fail to deliver the Middle technocratic class step up to organise the muddle having had the foresight to study epidemiolanodigology at university. They though realise that everything is imprecise however much one knows, but set out a better plan of action. This gives the lower class a basic framework on which to apply their cunning. Being used to jovial unpaid sporadic harassment this takes many forms. Most use their initiative to stay safe, look after their mum and family, tighten their belts, and save/acquire cash wherever possible. The minority, thankfully, believe what they heard while they weren’t listening and flout any useful advice. But luckily knowledge and awareness, unlike money, does trickle down with time. So in the pandemic we’re now in the latter stages of this process. The upper class have proved useless, the middle class have shown the way and the lower class have a decent grasp of what’s going on. And the final stage? This is when the cunning of the lower class and intelligence of the middle class join forces to create a bottom-up solution based on locally based action where local GP’s, health care professionals and co-opted organisers arrange testing, tracing and lock-downs virtually street by street. Lets face it we’re all pretty computer literate by now, we’ve local knowledge, got the pandemic picture and most of us are sitting at home with time on our hands. We form the greatest single (unused) workforce we’ve ever had and most of us would do it for nothing! So for god sake forget the 20 thousand centralised tracers watching Netflicks at £10/hr waiting for some expensive centralised computer system to work. I could write a spreadsheet for 1,000 people in a few hours and email it to every GP in the country for nowt. Sure China has draconian powers but we have the great British nous. We’re known for it. (along with a world crass government)

Dominic Cummings.

I watched Dominic Cummings in front of a select committee hearing. My view? A severely damaged individual. What do I mean? He disassembled every question like loosening the wheel nuts on an oncoming car making it career off the road before it got to him. Time and time again they tightened them and he loosened them making it appear it was their own machinery at some kind of irrational fault leaving him untouched in the middle of the road like some blank faced Midwich Cuckoo. This is not acquired political expediency, it’s a childhood survival mechanism. A lot of kids try it on but for it to remain the survival mechanism of a full grown adult suggests a fearful overbearing parent and a very damaged child. If anything I was damaged in the reverse way. In the face of overbearing illogic I now use logic as a means of survival; harming but not as dangerous. So Cummings will never show weakness or contrition and will use his considerable intellectual abilities to defend and manipulate anything that he perceives as overbearing, importantly irrespective of its rights and wrongs. As a hired gun he’s perfect. Tell him Remain is the overbearing establishment and he will cut it at the knees, Corbyn is soft, ditto, and the British public are clods and he will coral them like sheep. Caught in Durham he will concoct a heart warming explanation. And when Boris is pressured to sack him? Who knows, but what he’s given can be taken away, ‘know what I mean.’ No one’s born bad we just achieve it by our learnt defences. That Dominic dominates is forty years historical. What I’ve learnt in seventy odd years is however it’s explained certain people are best avoided and definitely not exploited for their childhood damage.