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.