Sunday 24 January 2010

The record skips and goes to the start of another song.

It’s the same dreary song we’ve heard over again from the same album. All the songs sound pretty much the same; artistic integrity isn’t the point of the exercise. We all roll our eyes, sigh, grumble, shake our heads and mutter, but we get up all the same and dance along with the dreary tune because we don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. After all we don’t want people staring at us for sitting there with our arms crossed over our chests because we’re not doing what everyone else is when we neither want nor need to do it. That’s just crazy.

So, over two thirds of the way through January and we’re being thrust headlong into another round of ‘Terrorismania!’. Note the exclamation point. The exclamation point is important. The exclamation point will dance with your mother. The exclamation point will tell you things about what happened that summer in Greece. The exclamation point will stand on the twelve kittens. The exclamation point has Import.

You can call it Terrorismania! or you can call it Threat Level: Severe. It’s really all down to personal taste. One sounds like a musical in the style of ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’ or ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and is probably more apt, while the other sounds like a straight to video action film starring Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren or Steven Seagal, a film that would be really quite good if it were written with any skill or panache, but just comes off as a bunch of pyros going off with people swearing in between – or in the case of Threat Level: Severe standing around waiting for the pyros to go off and not even having the energy to swear anymore until it peters out.

The UK terrorism threat level has been raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’. Feel the tension in the air here, people. Or don’t. This American-style scale of, ‘are we going to die in droves today’ seems to hover always around the vague bits. It could happen, but then again it might not. This upping of the heat doesn’t seem to mean anything practical for the day-to-day running of the country.

It’s all a little bit Mystic Meg really. Cold reading the country. There could be terrorists plotting something heinous, somewhere in the world right now and they’re probably right, but in general the people planning them are a combination of mad and incompetent, and we don’t ever see them. Unless they decide to become politicians in which case their careers sky rocket.

Now the general theory – denied by MI6, but used by the media and politicians – is that this is in response to the lone clod who failed to blow himself and a planeload of other travellers up in Detroit on Christmas last year (2009 for you future people).

Wait a second. Because a man who seems to have acted alone didn’t manage to do anything beyond scare the shit out of a plane load of people, the UK is expecting some kind of terrorist attack. There’s an interesting jump of logic. It’s almost like saying that nasty dog down the road bit Mister Robertson, all the dogs in the world must be preparing to overthrow mankind!

Never mind that a renegade group of the IRA have been twitching for the last few months, a man with incendiary underpants didn’t do anything was caught on a plane, we must do something! Let’s see, we’ll do a few token things and try to push through a full-body x-ray machine that wouldn’t have detected anything the Nigerian guy was carrying, but will have the benefit of humiliating anyone wanting to travel out of the country!

I am not reassured. I don’t think many people are. I (along with most of the country again) am not that intimidated either.

If it’s going to be Threat Level: Severe I at least want to wake up in the morning with a man (for some reason with a French accent, I don’t know why, I have no reason to believe that the French, Canadians or Belgians are particularly nasty people) sitting next to my bed pointing a gun at my head saying, “Tomorrow it could be you,” before holstering his weapon and walking out of the room. That would be a severe threat level that’s guaranteed to get my attention. Call it Threat Level: Imminent Death or don’t bother with it at all.

The Detroit thing reminds me of the attempted ‘bombing’ of Glasgow Airport a couple of years ago. Another bungled attack that did nothing more than show that the medical students involved were retarded and best off out of the medical profession and made a ned a celebrity for kicking a man who was on fire. It was inspiring, it really was. Apart from the fact that all that would have happened in the worst case scenario would have been a bit of property damage and the two men would have been, at the most, wounded – you see they were clever (in a vicious way) in wrapping the propane canisters up with ball bearings, but they didn’t realise that those tanks are designed to resist high temperatures and when they do explode they tear instead of shattering. Idiots.

What we got then was Gordon Brown (all nice and shiny from the recent hand-over of power) telling us to be more vigilant, essentially that there was a terrorist on every street corner waiting to blow up. A smart move by someone in power.

So in a time of economic uncertainty and political upheaval, the people in charge of the country have decided, in their infinite wisdom to concentrate on attempting to wind the populace up and be the heroes of the hour by shuffling papers and throwing some new terms at us. Oo, I feel about as protected as a cocktail sausage at a Tory Party Conference.

We’d be much happier if you just did your job and helped people back into work and into some kind of comfort.

So let’s get ready to put the record on the turntable one more time; I feel like a bit of a boogie.


Will

Thursday 14 January 2010

The Tower Shakes, But Doesn't Fall.

I have a hard time dealing with politics. It’s full of politicians for a start – an old chestnut that, but it wouldn’t be trotted out so much if it didn’t continue to be true on a year-on-year basis. It should be something more interesting, but all the really dramatic stuff that happens is lost in a fog of dull maintenance type debate and insipid protocol. It’s kind of like watching Formula 1 except more repetitive.

Heaven knows that I’ve tried to sit through even a few minutes of overfed men – and a few frightening-looking women – get up to do their little spiel about how the parking policy in their constituency’s hospital needs an overhaul or some such. I’m sure it’s very important to the democratic process and to the people that it affects, but it makes watching televised coverage of the House of Commons a major slog.

Who knows, maybe that’s been the point all along, to stop plebs like myself – brought up on half-hour chunks of television that moves along at brisk pace – from paying that much attention to what goes on there. Maybe before they televised the Commons the MPs stripped to the waist and beat each other with sticks to determine who won a debate.

Oh, fuck. That just put the image of Margaret Thatcher stripped to the waist into my head. I will now inflict it on you, good reader; I’ll be damned if I’m going to suffer that nightmare on my own. You too can wake up in a cold sweat, roused from your sleep by the thought of that evil old crone’s (because, let’s be honest, in the eighties she was still ancient, that kind of evil’s born that way) sagging body and the shrivelled dugs that passed for breasts on her bony chest, pale and blue veined as a wheel of stilton.

It’s good to share.

Anyway, I find it very hard to follow all the meta language that goes on within politics. In general a few moments of thought and I’ll know what they are babbling about and trying to evade, but I’m lazy and have other things I want to do than give too much brain-thinky time to how our government wants to screw us over this time.

(It leaves me with something of a grudging admiration for political correspondents who wade through all this political verbal diarrhoea. It’s how the bastards interpret what they’ve sifted that gets under my skin, but more on that later.)

My general difficulty following and getting intellectually involved in political debate, and the whole antipathy towards the breed known as Politician meant that I almost missed the nugget of decency from the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg that turned up earlier in the week.

Still very much in the shadow of the banks’ failure we’re seeing a bit of political upheaval in this country, after the US managed to shuck of a hideously corrupt regime, we’re going to get the opportunity to do the same; only we’ll just let another corrupt lot in right away. As I’ve said before there are more than two parties in this country, but there might as well only be two most of the time the way people vote. Except for the poor (as in actually impoverished and desperate) people who went mad and voted the unashamedly bigoted in so many ways BNP into a local government in England. It was scary, but I have a horrible feeling that as disgusting as the BNP are to the people of this constituency they may have been the most trustworthy of the lot.

Doesn’t say a lot for the democratic process though: if you feel so let down by a mainstream party, why don’t you vote for a party that has extreme views, that’ll show ‘em. Not the smartest move, I have to say, but it did seem to send a message.

It seems though, that Nick Clegg wants to make some major political changes, even going so far as reshaping Whitehall. Yes, Mister Clegg wants to shake up the whole British political map. He’s even gone so far as to get rid of a good chunk of his party’s pledges because they aren’t realistic in the current economic climate. Big words from the perennial also-rans.

But why should they always be consigned to third or even fourth place? If Nick Clegg were to even keep half of these promises it would mean the country would be a better place in which to live. It would make a great change from the continued bullshit of politicians telling the public, “You’ll have to put up with living in financial uncertainty for a few years more, but don’t worry all the people who caused this will stay rich and so will we. Aren’t you happy for us? Don’t you think we’re doing a stand-up job?”

I’ve intimated in the past that the Lib Dems are a bit of a wishy-washy, airy-fairy party, but with this kind of bold statement, and let’s be clear here it’s an honest statement (something you won’t hear me saying often about a politician of any stripe), he’s admitted that the things that his party has been promising for years are out of bounds and then he’s offered an alternative. An actual, concrete alternative. You don’t get that with the Tories or Labour, from them you get spin and more evasion. Just what the electorate want, vague assurances from the two ‘main’ parties that something will be done…but you’ll have to wait to find out what once you elect them.

In any other arena this would be called blackmail, whereas here people just shrug and go, “It’s politics,” and then go and vote for who they’ve always voted for and probably who their parents and grandparents voted for before them. They have the same kind of disinterest in politics that I try to fight through, but they don’t have the interest or energy to do even that.

Then, of course, you have the pundits and correspondents who rifle through all of these political shenanigans and give their opinions on it. I won’t say that they are all the same, I’m sure there are those who give a balanced and fair appraisal of the political climate. I can’t say, because I don’t read enough of them.

However, I’d just like to turn your attention to the BBC and their lead political correspondent and blogger Nick Robinson. The first time I saw Nick Robinson on television, he struck me as a dry and even sarcastic political commentator – just the type of person that I’d like to see giving opinions on the political landscape. I mean, he’s even had a little snarky banter with George W Bush, what a guy!

Then I started reading what he was actually saying in his BBC blog. The breaking point for me came when he varnished over Nick Clegg’s statements to burble on about the Tories and, in particular, the Labour party. He does more spin doctoring than Alastair Campbell. He does a marvellous job of taking what the Labour party says, interpreting it in such a way that it sounds like something more palatable and totally different.

“The government today unveiled plans for mulching newborn babies and using them as fertiliser. Let’s go to Nick Robinson…”

“When the Gordon Brown says he wants to mulch newborns, what he is in essence saying is that more should be spent on Primary Schools.”

I’ve seen this kind of thing a lot on the BBC. We see a politician saying one thing in the Commons and we go to a studio where the presenters tell us a completely different story of what happened. I mean it’s well-known that Politics is full of double-dealing and linguistic jiggery pokery, but can the meanings be that different from what politicians say and what they mean?

We need a more even-handed way of having politics (and the news in general) presented to us. The BBC have bought into the glossy American style of reporting current events that values bias and big events over telling us what’s happened, although they’ve yet to reach the depths of vacuous hideousness that Sky News (the British arm of Fox News, really) has delved. If they pull back again, they’ll probably be fine.

And this brings me onto the insane and shadowy world of the public opinion parts of news sites, but that’s for another time.


Will

Wednesday 6 January 2010

That old book.

A while ago I decided it would be a good idea ot update my Lulu anthology book and have it listed on Amazon. They've added all sorts of extra costs to it, but I hope you'll buy it because you love me and want to see me out of the poor house.

Find it here: Amazon


Will