the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Watching Monty Pythons ” Life of Brian ” again last night, it occurred to me of the striking similarity between Extinction Rebellion (XR) and The Peoples Front of Judea (PFJ), specifically in terms of its demands.

According to their website, one of XR’s demands is that “every part of society must act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025 and begin protecting and repairing nature immediately. The whole of society must move into a new precautionary paradigm, where life is sacred and all are in service to ensuring its future.” XR defend any action their activists commit by claiming that they are only doing so because UKplc isn’t acting fast enough to reach net zero and its therefore not XR’s fault.

In ‘Life of Brian’, the PFJ plan to kidnap Pontius Pilates wife and threaten to chop her up if their demands are not met. Which are, “giving Pilate two days to dismantle the entire apparatus go the Roman imperialist state and if he doesn’t agree immediately, we cut her head off.” Which will, of course, not the fault of the PFJ because ” they (the Roman imperialist state) bear full responsibility when we chop her up and that we will not respond to blackmail.”

Anyway, I’ve had a quick shift at their website and it it reads like a modern day incarnation of the PFJ, albeit with much more self righteouos justification and lofty posturing about inclusivity. Precisely therefore, two things that make me mad. And seeing as how I’ve a blog….

My recent blog focused on what I term the slippery slope of totalitarianism. And for the last time in a while, I’d like to beg your indulgence as I return to a theme that has no doubt been far more eloquently and cogently advanced by political scholars using lots of supporting evidence. But hey, I’ve no shame in playing the brain damage card and I’m playing it now.

Anyway, my latest contention is the idea that whilst this sort of totalitarian malarkey might well happen somewhere else, it could never happen in a stable democracy like ours, one with secure land borders, partly on account of it being an island. One with the rule of law, a legislature elected by the people within those borders to make those laws, an independent judiciary and a police force created for the purpose of enforcing those laws and punishing those who transgress. One that has a free press, free from government interference, a broad media landscape, which encourages a plurality of views, even if those views are dissenting. And so on and etc…

But, and here’s the thing, the other day when I wrote about how one boils a frog, one puts in cold water and then gradually heats it up until too late does the frog have any idea something is wrong, well it got me thinking. Specifically about Verbal Kind from ‘The Usual Suspects’. Now I’m about to spoil the film for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it, but then if you haven’t seen it yet then my question to you is why haven’t you seen it. The film follows the interrogation of Roger “Verbal” Kint, a small-time con man, who is one of only two survivors of a massacre and fire on a ship docked at the Port of Los Angeles. Through flashback and narration, Kint tells an interrogator a convoluted story of events that led him and his criminal companions to the boat, and of a mysterious crime lord—known as Keyser Söze—who controlled them. The twist is that at the end of the film, after Verbal is free of the police station does the interrogator realise that Verbal and Keyser Soze are on and the same.

Everything Verbal has said is almost certainly a lie. The cinema audience, like the interrogator in the film, is primed through prior experience to believe him. We have been complicit in hoodwinking ourselves. Much as Verbal has done in fooling us with an entertaining lie, my contention is that whilst we are told that other regimes are or have been totalitarian, we fool ourselves into thinking we are different.

Bear in mind what I wrote about a slippery slope in a previous blog. That the best kind of slippery slop is one that doesn’t appear as a slope at all until you’re at the bottom of it.

The rule of law? Exactly who elected the current PM and his predecessor? Since 2001 we’ve had six general elections but eleven PM’s. Most of whom were never elected by the electorate but by a two tiny self-selecting vested interest groups. The legislature is made up from an increasing unrepresentative section of the population, one which make laws that they then interpret as they see fit. Of course of these laws ruthlessly enforced by police force which is often denounced by the press as being a bit too much this and not enough of that. That would be the free press that is, and always has been, owned by a few very wealthy individuals with equally few moral scruples. Speaking of which, social media, which has all the morality of a sex addict at an orgy and can always be relied upon to create a crisis and watch it go.

So are we on the slope or not? It’s just as Verbal says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Sometimes it feels as if our democracy is bit like Debbie Magee, the famous assistant to the magician Paul Daniels. We look at her when we should be looking at him instead. But the sun is shining, it’s nice and pleasant here in sunny Southwold, far too nice to think about all this. Instead what I should be thinking about is ‘Where and when will I ever get a decent steak and kidney pie?”

Hello Melissa!

Yesterdays post was my 500th one and according to my stats, I’ve got 50 followers. Now all I need is for more than 5 of them to read each post and I’ll be laughing. But in this digital world in which we live, what is often isn’t, meaning that some of those 50 followers were hoping that somehow my followers would become their followers. How or even why this works is beyond me but I recall shortly after signing up with WordPress getting a message advising me to do exactly that. That by the power of Castle Greyskull a sort of digital alchemy would take place. Perhaps if I was bothered enough to learn I’d know, but as I’m not I’ll carry on, as happy in my ignorance as most of my followers are not reading my posts. That’ll show ’em

But on!

Writing about the Pol Pot and Year Zero yesterday, my mind couldn’t help but see a connection between re-education camps and the innocently named training days we are offered at work, some of which are mandatory. Granted they’re both on different ends of a very long spectrum but to me the aim of both is to achieve much the same thing. Which is essentially telling people that the way they are thinking is wrong, but with re-education they’ll learn to think the right way, the proscribed and approved way, and that they’ll end up the better person for it. Well that to me smacks of Year Zero and the ones that take place in despotic regimes are at least honest about what they’re doing. But workplace based training days, with their paid skive of a day off, a quick mental game of ‘snog marry avoid’ as everyone introduces themselves, refreshments, a proper lunch hour and an early finish are not. They’re not double handy, even if it’s on a Friday.

Because after more than a few of these, I’d wager that opinions may begin to alter, some may wholeheartedly agree that the new way of thinking, they might’ve already had issues with the old way and thus were willing converts. Whereas others may simply read the room and pay lip service and the rest will say little, keep their heads down, their mouths shut and eye on the clock. It struck me that the less steep the slippery slope is, the less anyone will know its a slippery slope to begin with and that’s what all these training days, awareness courses and assorted workshops are, the imperceptible descent downward. That and a cushy number.

Believe me, I should know, because implausibly absurd as it may seem, one of my gigs before the accident was as an ‘Equality and Diversity Training Officer’. And not at some fly-by-night outfit either, no this was with a serious business staffed by serious people who were doing serious grown-up things. But then, after I told my housemates that my bosses had thought they just add it on to whatever else I wasn’t doing, and they’d wiped the tears of laughter from their eyes, they knew I was ideally suited really as I hated everyone equally.

But seriously, it is a worrying trend, that of businesses wanting to modify and influence their staffs behaviour. Whatever their reasons, the result is the same, changing the peoples actions, their thoughts and the language they use to articulate those thought, all with the express aim of inducing a shift in thinking. Towards to the values of now with the caveat of the euphemistically titled ‘refresher’ courses tomorrow so newer ways of thinking might be taught. And repeat..

I know, we don’t live in a country that does that, but that is kind of the point. Its like boiling a frog, you don’t bung it in boiling water at the start, no what you do is bung in him some cold water, let them get comfortable, and then gradually turn the heat up.

Yesterdays post was longer than I’d anticipated. In my mind, it was going to be in short, pithy post, but I just got carried away and couldn’t help myself. It also made me think made me think of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, and Year Zero, specifically the bit when I wrote of;

the almost totalitarian idea that who who you are and more importantly, how you feel about things, has greater cultural cachet and influence than those who with almost perverse obtusity, cling to the wrong

Telling people that the way they are thinking is wrong, but with re-education they’ll learn to think the right way, the proscribed and approved way, and that they’ll end up the better person for it, well that to me smacks of Year Zero. I accept that it we are thankfully nowhere even near that now, but I’d contend that we are perilously close to the edge of a slippery slope that could easily end up somewhere like that.

Upon seizing power in 1975, Pol Pot immediately renamed Cambodia as Democratic Kampuchea and Year Zero began. One less than generous interpretation of Year Zero is that it effectively meant that all culture and traditions were completely destroyed or discarded and that a new revolutionary culture would then replace it starting from scratch. Meaning therefore, that all of the history of Cambodia and its people before Year Zero was deemed irrelevant, because it would ideally be wiped out of existence, to be replaced from the ground up. The problem, of course, who was in charge of the replacing and what they thought it should be replaced with. Seem familiar? Certain beliefs being deemed outdated and irrelevant, the past being critically re-appraised, with an almost pathological need to denounce it and by extension, the society it created?

A simpler explanation, one that might be more readily understandable in 2023, was that it was a complete reboot of Cambodia

Marvellous it wasn’t

Knowledge of anything pre-Year Zero was prohibited. To ensure that there was no recorded memory of a pre-Year Zero society, books were burned and the wearing of glasses was also criminalized as it was taken to indicate that one might habitually read books. The only acceptable lifestyle was that of peasant agricultural workers. Centuries of Cambodian culture and institutions were thereby eliminated—shutting down factories, hospitals, schools, and universities—along with anyone who expressed interest in their preservation. So-called New People—members of the old governments and intellectuals in general, including lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, clergy, and qualified professionals in all fields—were thought to be a threat to the new regime and were therefore especially singled out and executed along with their extended families during the purges accompanying Year Zero.

Before Pol Pot and Year Zero, Cambodia had a population of just over 7 million. It is estimated that somewhere between 2 – 4 million died as a result of the policies carried out by the Khmer Rouge.

The problem with a slippery slope is that often some people fail to realise it is one, usually those so ideologically committed to pursuing what they consider to the path to a chimeric utopia that they only realise when they’re at the bottom of the slope that there was one after all.

Just as I posted yesterdays blog, I remembered a quote that summed up rather neatly the point I had been trying making so inelegantly. Actually, I sort of half-remembered it, meaning I couldn’t remember who said it, only that it had been said and that it was pertinent. But thanks to wikipedia (to which I donate and would urge you to as well), I not only have the quote, but also the context in which it was uttered:

The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio.^[1][2] In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored, Stewart wrote:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

So being unable to define a thing, but still be able to recognise it, might’ve been seen as progressive in 1964, but in the culture wars of the 2023, it has been co-opted by ‘snowflakes’ who have inverted it so it is now regressive. A ‘snowflake’ is someone wikipedia describes thusly;

“Snowflake” is a derogatory slang term for a person, implying that they have an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, or are overly emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions.

One sort of expects this from young people, after all it is part of being young that one look at the world their parents and their parents have created and find faults with it, and seek to remedy those faults. Every young person ever has done it. It’s how societal change happens and indeed needs to happen but with a sense that everybody is on board with it. An example being same-sex marriage. Britain in the 1950’s was not the Britain of of 2000’s. Attitudes and social mores changed, possibly too fast for some, not fast enough for others, but just right for most. The ‘Goldilocks’ theory of social change.

This has been abandoned so now something can be denounced as wrong by those looking to find wrongs, but without any consensus that this is so (a Twitter generated storm doesn’t count), and then immediately demand that the perceived wrong is not only corrected, but that every trace of it in recent history is expunged.

But what seems so inexplicably perverse about the all this, is that the very people one might’ve expected to be defending diversity of opinion together with an understanding that nuance exists, championing science based evidence and notionally being liberal, are doing the very opposite. It seems that old divides and values of the left and right which I for one had taken as a given, no longer exist. This is because right – in the sense of not being wrong – is so vehemently contested and liable to seemingly arbitrary change. And because this seems increasingly to be the case – the almost totalitarian idea that who who you are and more importantly, how you feel about things, has greater cultural cachet and influence than those who with almost perverse obtusity, cling to the wrong – consensus is more unachievable than ever.

One thinks of Suzy Izzard’s ‘ Circle of Cool’, the notion that there is a circle of cool and at at the back of the circle is where something ultra cool and groovy morphs into looking like a dickhead. So in a less funny, less looking cool but very much looking like a dickhead kind of a way, the ultra-liberal left morph into very extreme right wingers.

Last night my partner and I were engaged.

I know she’ll read this, so to forestall her brutal realignment of my gender by the repeated and prolonged introduction of her feet to my man bits, we were of course engaged in conversation. You know, the kind that where you can’t exactly how you arrived at a certain point, one which causes you to look back wistfully to a more live and let live world. A world where one didn’t exactly accept things so much as innately understood that just because you didn’t like something, you had a choice. That choice being either to ignore it, and to tut loudly to yourself, or to become Mary Whitehouse and call for it to be banned. A part of the social contract that helps gel society together, a shared but unspoken acknowledgment that one day that one day the your likes might easily be someone else’s dislikes. But then as Mrs.Thatcher said, there was no such thing as society, and as we all know, history has been kind to her.

My partner was telling me about working as an usher at the Roundhouse Theatre in Camden many years ago, back in the mists of time, probably when the mists were probably caused by cigarette smoke. Imagine that children, smoking indoors! Shocking! Adults just left to get on with things and enjoy being being adults because it hadn’t yet dawned on someone that just because something they didn’t like was happening, then it should be stopped from happening. Anyway, she told me about one performance she’d ushered where the performer had shit in a bucket.

What was shocking to me wasn’t just that they’d timed it just right so that they could shit on cue, or had taken care only to eat foods that made such precision possible. No what was really shocking that this wasn’t considered shocking by the Theatre, the audience or the staff then – well not to a placard waving mob outside the Roundhouse extent anyway – and that to us both in2023. Yes there are things that are shocking, but shitting in a bucket isn’t one of them. It might be distasteful, but whilst it might be visually unpleasant there is artistry involved. Not my thing, but hey, carry on.

This made me think of Joanna Cherry because according to the BBC and others;

SNP MP Joanna Cherry is threatening to take legal action against an Edinburgh venue which cancelled a Fringe show in which she was due to appear.

She says she will take “whatever legal action is necessary” unless The Stand admits that it acted unlawfully, issues an apology and reinstates the event.

The venue had cancelled the show after staff said they were not comfortable with her views on transgender issues.

The very idea of an arts venue being somehow being prisoner to the feelings of its staff seems to be as ludicrous as it is chilling. How is this not censorship dressed up as ‘safeguarding’? Just because you’re not comfortable with someone’s views doesn’t make those views any more or less problematic, you become the problem by dint of trying to prevent those views from being expressed in the first place.

Giving that power to staff is to fundamentally abdicate any notion of freedom of choice by the venue management. The choice of an audience mainly. Or the choice of the staff concerned to consider that maybe, just maybe, they’re in the wrong job, that maybe working in an arts venue isn’t always going to be finger painting for the under 5’s and balloon sculpting workshops. That possibly an arts venue is exactly the sort of place one might hear their views challenged, and that equally possible, their views should be challenged. People proclaim they believe in free speech right up until the point that they disagree with what the person wants to say, and then it isn’t free speech anymore, because they believe in free speech, of course they do, but this isn’t it.

Mind you, good job they weren’t working at the National Film Theatre when we were hosting the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in the ’90’s. Some of the films…

I wish to apologise to anyone who read my “the shit in the shit on the shitter post’ read the warning that presaged it, and were understandably disappointed to read on only to discover that it wasn’t as gross as they’d hoped. I can only assure them I’ll try and redeem this shocking lack of toilet based obscenity with todays effort, which reading back now before posting is nowhere near as gross as advertised. In my defence, I’m on holiday and therefore can’t draw upon inspiration from Viz’s Profanasurus,

*********************************

The body is a wonderful thing, so wonderful that we in fact take it for granted. We give no thought to the frankly miraculous ability for the skin to immediately begin to repair itself after being cut. Or the fact that all broken ribs need is some tight bandaging and rest. Or indeed elasticity, a phenomena whereby by the brain basically heals itself. I could go on, but you get the point. And if the point is your body telling you in unmistakeable terms that you need to eat more fruit and vegetables, you know two things for sure. First being, if its gotten to this state of affairs, any remedial action you take now will only have future benefits and secondly, your body will emit sounds that no human should.

Initially, you’ll notice that you are expending a lot of effort without any commensurate result. We’re not talking about phantom poo’s here, the one’s when feel you’ve extruded a turd the size and girth of a baby’s arm, are sometimes lucky enough to feel still leaving your body as it enters the water, only to see an empty pan meeting your expectant gaze Disheartening doesn’t begin to cover it, and even bother to pretend that you don’t have a Scooby what I’m on about. Because you do. But we’re not talking about phantom poo’s here, what I mean is when you’ve sat on the toilet for so long that your arse goes numb but the water below remains untouched. The air, however doesn’t.

There are many sounds one hears, all of them amplified by the wondrous acoustic properties of covered porcelain and to which I’ve spent rather too much time distracting myself by trying to describe the many sounds of a grumpy sphincter.can make. First off there’s the bog standard one, which sounds rather like like the noise a balloon makes when you slowly let air out it. A sort of high pitch squeak which if you emitted on a boat far out to sea, would be mistaken by dolphins as a mating call. Or if you were elsewhere in the house, perhaps thoroughly engrossed in a good book, might hear and think ‘Ah good, the mousetraps are working.’

Then there are the ones that sound like someones trying to open a door whose hinges haven’t been oiled. Ever. The sort of sound that would be followed by a blood curdling scream in a horror movie. Then there are the strange gurgling noises that issue forth from somewhere below the belly button, but one isn’t sure where exactly. The sort of gurgling sound that conjures thoughts of a mad scientists house and beakers full of foaming green liquid. I start to while away the boredom by wondering exactly how high pitched a dog whistle needs to be, or at what point a humans ear starts to bleed. Anything other than focus on the fact that not much of anything is happening, but consoling myself that I’m in the right place if it does.

When this aural hoax happens, I take comfort in the knowledge that every single human being ever has experienced this. That every person who has ever lived has looked up at the same moon, gazed upon the same sun, felt grass beneath their feet, felt oddly uncomfortable when they see a couple where the female is taller than the male and whose arse has sounded like the last sound a dying bird makes.

Humpty Dumpty used words as and when he liked, with no regard for their meaning, deciding on what they meant according to his own whims. Brian is exactly the same. According to the BBC news site:

King Charles added that he and his wife would now rededicate their lives to “serving the people of the United Kingdom, the Realms and Commonwealth”

How exactly are they planning to do this? Is he going to volunteer one day a week as a teaching assistant at an inner city primary.? Is she going pull all night shifts as a hospital porter at an NHS hospital. No. He just spouts the same old guff and expects us tug our forelocks, bow so much that our noses are scraping the floor and unquestioning believe him. Goebbels maxim regarding telling a big enough lie often enough that it becomes true springs to mind whenever I hear about the ‘hardworking royals’. A single mother who lives on benefits and struggles to feed her family is hard working. A fireman is hardworking. Someone whose most difficult decision each day is what colour tie to wear when he cuts a ribbon for some charity set up just as a tax dodge by isn’t anything other than dressing up and pretending.

The only person he’s ever served is himself. Oh, and that nice old man at the drop in centre that the PR team helped set up once.

As the title suggests, this is not something to read if you are eating.

Don’t say I didn’t warned you.

They say that travel broadens the mind, and indeed it does. I’ve discovered loads of new, irrational prejudices that would’ve remained unknown to me if I stayed at home. But thankfully there are a few remaining grains of sand with which to bedevil my seaside idyll.

One of them is the ever present conspiracy of bed manufacturers. They seem incapable of comprehending the idea that some people are over 6ft tall, and as most can’t take off their legs and prop them by the side of the bed, might need a bed that allows for this. Generously, I might add. It is as much use as a cement football to make beds that are not only small, but also have restraints at the foot of them. Meaning that not only is the bed too small, you can’t even stretch your legs out over the end. You are effectively imprisoned. And why this bizarre affectation for memory foam mattresses? As far as I can tell, the only memory a memory foam mattress has is of every one who’s ever slept on it.

And bed withs are another bugbear…

But nowhere near as infuriating as toilets that are so manifestly unsuited to the task they’re meant to facilitate, it almost makes me believe in the devil and that he’s somehow possessed the minds of plumbers when they install bathrooms.

Take this morning. Without going into detail, (which means I’m about to) I prefer to toilet sitting down for both activities, and for the second of these, being able to spread my legs as far as possible. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t much care for extruding potentially very messy objects out of my body only to have them squashed together at the point of exit and make even more of a mess. (Imagine someone really tightly swashing together a Nutella sandwich. Or perhaps don’t.) I know. Silly me for not wanting to be shitty me.

But the toilet in this place has been sandwiched between a wall and the bath. Between the wall and my left leg there is but the width of two of my calves. On the right, even less, resulting in the less than edifying spectacle of me hoisting the leg into the bath and leaning over to my left to successfully complete the matter in hand. Made all the more difficult when there is a growing sense of urgency about things.

I warned you.

Have just caught the end of ‘celebration concert’ at Windsor Castle, the one to mark Brians ability to sit on a chair and wear a hat. You know, the Windsor Castle the taxpayer paid to have rebuilt after it was nearly burnt to the ground. That one. Mind you, its a good job Brian doesn’t know any smokers.

Anyway, Kate Perry was bothering peoples ears and wearing something that was truly out of this world. Really. The last time anyone had seen that material it had been covering the NASA Lunar Rover on the surface of the moon, but I guess NASA and Lunar sort of told you it wasn’t in the deep oceans.

Then Take That came on and I thought ‘Blimey, the years haven’t been kind to Mark Owen have they?’ He used to be the sweet faced good looking one. But now, not so much. Long hair and cuban heels on a man over 40 is not a good look. Howard or Jason, the one that isn’t Gary or Robbie anyway, looked like he was the sort of bloke that should be helping police with their enquiries.

And not since ‘Live Aid’ have I seen Brian so unconvincingly look like he was enjoying himself. One of the Junior leeches was there. In a suit and tie, of course. What else would a 9 year old boy wear to a concert. And it certainly put the con into concert. Compulsory fun, the audience being told how great x was, how brilliant y was. It made me mad.

In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that someone has liked my last blog post who I didn’t even know got them anymore, I’d be pulling someone’s hair out by now