Kapitano: Articles

Showing posts with label Articles. Show all posts

Doing the Wild Thing

People talk a lot of crap about pornography.

Once when I was at school, a group of pupils got together to describe the porn film they'd all seen the night before, entitled Animal Farm. Exactly why they felt the need to explain to each other what they'd collectively seen was a little unclear.

One scene involved using the cardboard centre of toilet roll as a speculum, wedging open the lips of a woman's vagina, so a mouse could crawl up the tube and...scrabble about, while the woman made delirious moaning noises of pleasure. A few points about that:

* A cardboard tube is too weak to be used as a speculum.
* If you actually did this, what you'd get in quick succession would be a panicking mouse trying to dig it's way out, a lot of pain, a lot of screaming, a lot of blood, and a suffocated mouse.
* The 'infamous' porn film called Animal Farm is a myth. There was a series of four titleless German films, which some wag collectively christened under that name. They showed one young women having open-air sex with various farm animals

In fact she really had grown up on a remote farm with an abusive mother and no affection except from animals she tended. Her sexuality formed around in this situation, and in her twenties she was discovered by a porn producer.

So, surprise surprise, a bunch of thirteen year old boys talked a load of implausible crap to each other. But adult and serious journalists are a different matter, aren't they?

In the early nineties, a slew of lip-smacking TV documentaries stoked up public paranoias about paedophilia, pornography, snuff films, organised crime and horror movies. The issues were smeared so much into each other, that any discussion of pornography became a discussion about child abuse, and every time a child disappeared it was automatically suspected they'd been kidnapped by gangsters to be killed on camera by...literal wankers. And there was vast army of Other People out there who'd pay to watch it.

The first of these I saw claimed to have unprecedented access to the archives of the Metropolitan Vice Squad - depicted as an enormous warehouse of VHS porn. The presenter described how one 'typical' film showed a young boy being gang raped then clubbed to death.

It only came out years later that the Vice Squad had, in their history, seized exactly zero snuff movies. In fact there was and is no evidence that these things existed. I know of no reliable 'sightings' of such films, or any police force anywhere in the world that claims to have found one.

The deeply serious, respectable, concerned journalist, presenting disturbing information about things he'd been traumatised researching in the higher cause of public understanding...was Making Shit Up.

This was also the time of obsessions concerning alien abductions, the internet, government conspiracies...and covens of satanists. So it's not surprising the mass media invented mass child abuse rings - hinting at the possibility of satanic involvement over the internet and a coverup.

There were other permutations too. One scare was about a 'video nasty' (ie horror film) called I Spit on Your Grave, supposedly about a psychotic women who kills four men with fire. In fact, it's about a woman who's raped and beaten four times by four men, and takes somewhat overcomplicated revenge on them, one of which involves fire. If anything, it's a feminist revenge fantasy. A minor one was all about gerbiling, the equally impossible male equivalent of the cardboard tube trick.

Another film that thirteen year old boys claim to have seen is Deep Throat - a seminal (so to speak) classic of 70s porn. Some people will tell you that the star, Linda Lovelace, was a battered wife forced to do the movie by her abusive husband - and that you can see the bruises on her body in the film.

I've seen Deep Throat, and I can tell you two things about it. First, there's no bruises visible, and second, it's the campest porn film I've ever seen. There's a self-consciously preposterous plot, and a lot of OTT acting, with some terrible jokes. It's...fun.

In the 80s and 90s, a lot of academic feminists decided the main issue in the oppression of women was photographs of them having sex. Childcare, low pay, the glass ceiling and gross sexism were seemingly 'not as important to ordinary women'.

Some of them suggested the main issue might be rape, or domestic violence, so many - like Andrea Dworkin - fudged the issue by saying all three were the same thing really.

Her classic work Pornography: Men Possessing Women - which I've read and had to stop myself throwing out of the window - argues that pornography doesn't lead to rape, pornography isn't a practice run or an instruction manual for rape, pornography is rape. Though she never quite explains how.

She used a lot of highly selective examples, presented as typical and implicitly stating that all men can't grasp the difference between fantasy and reality. Oh, and at one point she claimed that gay male porn is abusive to women because it excludes then. Headdesk.

In later life she famously claimed that a group of male colleagues at a conference had abducted, drugged and raped her in a hotel room. When the colleagues proved it couldn't have happened because they weren't there, she went quiet. That was not the only time she'd claimed to have been drugged and raped.

I don't know about you, but I find it disconcerting that probably the best known and most cited radical feminist in the world was severely delusional and in need of psychiatric help - which she never got.

She wasn't exactly helpful to the cause of human rights for half the human population. I should mention that I think her book on Right Wing Women is worth a look.

Now we have a new porn fear - crush movies. There are various definitions - here's one from PetAbuse.com:

Crush videos, also known as squish or trampling videos, cater to fetishists who gain sexual gratification from watching women torture and kill small animals by stepping on them.

Typically, those crushing will use their buttocks or feet, making this fetish popular amongst many foot fetishists, as crushing by feet is usually the main focus. The foot (barefoot or in shoes) is thus often idolized by someone with a crush fetish.

So...this is porn for foot fetishists...who are also turned on by animal cruelty. Clearly a burgeoning market. Not only that, it's explained with cod-psychology a five year old could see through.

This online petition actually links to "THE SHOCKING TRUTH" - a marginally relevant Snopes article, which doesn't support the petition's hypothesis.

Wikipedia talks about the crushing of insects - which amazingly does exist in porn - while a facebook group claims it's about crushing kittens - the only evidence being a link the to the wikipedia article which only mentions invertebrates.

So, is there someone somewhere who gets sexually turned on by images of cruelty to animals? I suppose it's possible - there are certainly enough people who get off in some way watching 24, and enough anti-vivisection websites that wallow in the blood and pain a little too much.

Is there a hitherto unknown mass of people with that taste? Is it somehow contagious? Is there a previously invisible movie industry to serve it? No. This is another tedious moral panic, part of the wider madness of crowds that's been going on for centuries - the fear of other people having sex.

Not Like Progress

NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

As with all good abbreviations each word is misleading - there's no basis in neurology, not much to do with language, and there's no sense in which the brain can be programmed like a computer. If there were, there'd be no such thing as a teacher.

It's composed of large sections of Scientology, fragments of misunderstood Chomskyian linguistics, a smattering of cod Freudian psychology, and elements taken from EST.

EST is an expensive crank therapy based on the idea that if a lot of people shout abuse at you for several hours, you'll eventually have a miniature nervous breakdown, which will in some way liberate you from "old" ways of thinking, which will in some way turn you into middle manager better at manipulating other middle managers. NLP makes the same basic promise, but tries to offer variations for everyone.

It was originally formulated by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Bandler now spends his time increasing his multimillionaire fortune suing everyone (including Grinder) who teaches NLP without buying his permission. He uses the cash to keep up the most amazing cocaine habit.

The premises of NLP are that:
(1) The mental processes of the best people in any field can be modelled,
(2) You can reprogram your behavior to mimic these processes,
(3) This will make you just as successful as them, regardless of your circumstances.

If you want to know whether NLP or the methods of any other self-perfection cult are effective, you have two options. You can either spend years wading through hundreds of arcane abstractions before asking yourself whether they add up to anything...or you can look at its master practitioners, and ask yourself whether they fulfil the method's promise.

Scientologists are supposed to have perfect mental and physical health. Objectivists are supposed to be completely rational, whatever that means. NLPers are supposed to be able to read your inmost desires and manipulate you any way they wish.

In fact Scientologists tend to be mental wrecks, Objectivists are preening jerks, and NLPers are among the most lonely, hated and ineffective people you'll ever meet.

And the most gullible, obviously.

Time Warp

Did that MTV Rocky Horror remake ever get made? I'm guessing not - I would have heard the collective raspberry from the critics.

Did you know there were two remakes of Casablanca? And a TV series? All predictably dire and predictably forgotten. There were recently remakes of Get Carter and The Wicker Man, which everyone knew would sink without trace - everyone except those experts paid large sums by Hollywood to know what'll sink without trace.

I've actually seen the Stepford Wives remake - it was done as a comedy for no some reason, but without any laughs, even unintentional ones. I saw the Cohen Brother's remake of The Ladykillers, which would have been an okay-but-forgettable film if only they'd said it was "inspired by" the original, which effectively it was.

There was even a sort-of sequel to Rocky Horror called Shock Treatment - which has, shall we say, its own highly select cult following. Grease had a sequel and a remake, which is to say it had two footnotes even more embarrassing than the film itself.

There was a literal shot-by-shot remake of Psycho, which seems to be rooted in one of those pseudophilosophical ideas that only first year film students think is clever. I speak as an ex-film student.

Spot research for this post has reminded me of the 2006 Pink Panther movie with Steve Martin, which I'd mercifully managed to forget. And Posiden (2006), The Italian Job (2001) and the 2001 Planet of the Fucking Apes. So thanks for that, Google.

Returning to my own memory, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin sitcom has been re-booted twice - once as the American Reggie - remembered now because it was so execrable - and a more recent British remake that wasn't so bad in itself - it was just a completely pointless updating of something that didn't need any updating.

Michael Caine, commenting on the Get Carter remake, made the very valid observation that if you're going to have another go at a movie, do it with one that didn't work the first time. Though I'm not sure of the wisdom of remaking Battlefield Earth or trying I am Legend for the forth (yes, forth) time.

You could remake Mission to Mars a dozen times and eventually wind up with Red Planet...or you could just watch Red Planet. I'm perversely intrigued by how long it'd take to rehabilitate the piss stain of Black Hawk Down into the blood stain of Apocalypse Now.

Not all remakes are abysmal. Meet Joe Black was a remake of the 1934 Death Takes a Holiday, and wasn't amazing but wasn't horrible either. I'm told Battlestar Galactica was great and the 70's version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a good film in its own right. I quite like both versions of The Fly.

The Johnny Depp Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has its fans - though I confess I haven't seen it and hated the Gene Wilder version. The classic Victor/Victoria actually was a remake, as was Scarface. You could make a case that The Magnificent Seven is a direct remake of Seven Samurai.

But what do I know? I preferred The Icicle Thief to The Bicycle Thief.

Mad, Innit?

Have you ever had a few minutes when you just had to sniff or wipe your nose repeatedly because it kept feeling like it was going to start dripping any moment? Were you one of those children who, having touched something once with one hand, felt compelled to touch it with the other hand? Did you spend your pubescent years trying to fit your actions into patterns based on a particular number?

Did you go through a long phase when you compulsively whispered what you or someone else had just said? Or when you only felt comfortable when you'd brushed all your upper teeth before your lower ones?

If the answer to any of these questions is "Yes" or "Not exactly, but something like it" then I have two items of news for you. First, you have or had Tourette's Syndrome. Second, I'm pretty sure most people have it to some extent when they're growing up.

Tourette's? Isn't that the one where you make animal noises and uncontrollably shout rude words in supermarkets? Well, not exactly. That's the popular image of Tourette's, but it's an extremely rare form. Mostly it's a repetitive action of swallowing, shrugging, saying particular words, humming, moving in a particular way etc.

The Tourette's sufferer don't do these things unwittingly or uncontrollably. Rather, they experience a very strong compulsion, which they can with discomfort resist for a while, before the "pressure" builds up too much and they submit.

In other words, someone with Tourette's doesn't have a neurological condition, or any kind of "genetic" "disease", or any condition that could be meaningfully called "insanity". No, what they've got is superstition. A strong, self-created internal imperative to perform some action - the action's value being ceremonial rather than practical. It's a ritual to ward of "the bad" - where the bad could be illness, pain, the disapproval of others, or anything regarded with fear.

You think that does sound a bit like madness? Then consider that Tourette's symptoms almost always occur between the ages of around seven and fifteen. And consider how children in that age range easily accept such superstitions as "Don't walk on the cracks or the bears will get you" and "You must drink from the special cup".

Tourette's Syndrome is simply the invention of one's own childhood superstitions - and then getting trapped by them, at least until they naturally fade away. Occasionally (or is it frequently?) they don't fade away. The actor Derek Jacobi has discussed in interview how, before doing some things, he has to nod three times and say the word "Amen" to himself - and to do it three times. He plausibly connects it to his catholic upbringing, with the special word "Amen" and the special number three.

Conventional psychology posits (on no evidence) a neurological cause for all this, and prescribes drugs. This is the same conventional psychology that diagnoses "lack of writing practice" as "Dyslexia", "being socially awkward" as "Asperger's Syndrome" and "School being boring" as "ADHD" - and prescribes drugs for the disease called "being human".

It's an open question, and I've no idea how to answer it, but: How many of the socially disapproved acts which get adults put in asylums or zombfied on medication are merely private superstitions which they never grew out of?

In cases where the ritual involves shouting numerals or spinning in circles, the "tic" is disruptive and obvious to all. But what about the presumable majority who have non-disruptive tics? Just odd little habbits that bystanders don't notice or classify as eccentricities? There doesn't seem a qualitative difference.

I only write this because, after revisiting a classic video cutup and following it up with the Wikipedia article, I realised that, yes folks...(cue drum roll)...I was a textbook Tourette's child.

My superstitions changed over time, but there were two basic ones:
1) Presage any important action with a voiceless glottal plosive - think of the "kick drum" sound made by human beatboxes - and close the action with another one.
2) Segment repeated actions, like those involved in eating or walking, into sets of four, and if possible square multiples of four. This was to "enclose" them in a protective box.

Those were my rituals, and I had then between around seven and twelve, but what were the fears they guarded against? I think a nebulous fear of unnumbered, uncompartmentalised chaos.

Of course, I've also been informally diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, Dyslexia, and (my favourite) Social Anxiety Disorder. Seeing as these are all synonyms for "normal but has trouble with some tasks", and seeing as I can now speedread and sing in public, I reckon that makes me extremely normal.

The East is Pink

The conference was actually called "Being Gay in the Middle East", though it inevitably morphed early on into a discussion on what's called "Liberal Interventionism" - invading Afghanistan to stop them shooting their women, bombing Iraq to stop them persecuting their Jewish population etc. Forcing people to be nice by pointing a gun at them.

There's a lot of liberals around who take an interventionist stance. They're the ones who say "We're against war in general but this one is righteous because the enemy oppresses Group X", for each war that comes along. Some prominent liberals who avoided falling into interventionism for previous wars (Christopher Hitchens, Peter Tatchell) have fallen for it big time in the war on terror.

It was highly surprising therefore, and very pleasing, for these people to be absent from this debate. Surprising because they advertised it and anticipated it in the blogosphere. Pleasing because arguments about interventionism can get really vitriolic and unpleasant.

The first speaker was Jinan Coulter, and her spiel set the tone for most of what followed: Some Islamic countries kill and harass people for being gay, and some don't. Some christian, Buddhist and Hindu countries do, and some don't. Some used not to but do now, and vice versa. So to advocate going to war with "Islam" because it's uniquely homophobic is absurd, even in its own terms.

The second speaker was Nathan Shaked, aka "Mr Gay Israel" and "Mr Gay International". He had nothing to say beyond (paraphrasing), "I'm Israeli but I don't agree with the way my government treats the Palestinians, and I think if everyone could just get together and stop hating each other long enough to have a proper discussion, we'd be able to see we're not very different, and come to some mutually beneficial arrangement over our disputes."

Heartwarming, and in its way true, but not very useful.

The third speaker was Ali Hili, who is involved in setting up safe houses in Iraq for gays and women.

Prior to the occupation, homosexuality was illegal under Saddam Hussein, but the law was not enforced. Now that Iraq is reduced to dozens of warring splinter groups (including the puppet government), there are death squads roaming around, killing anyone they think might be gay, plus any women who aren't sufficiently covered up. Or collaborators, or anyone who doesn't follow exactly their line.

That lunatic fringe that Fox News presented as representative of all Arabs/Muslims...they've rushed into the power vacuum and there's no one left who can hold them back. Nice one, Mr Bush.

Most contributions from the floor were unremarkably sensible and filled in details of what the three "platform" speakers said. Though there was one mad woman at the back who, upon learning that the anti-sodomy laws of Asia and the Middle East were put in place by colonial occupiers (British, French, and Portuguese) and retained by the local rulers afterwards...demanded to know how anyone could say there was a link between homophobia and colonialism.

On the horizon, shadowing everything else, was the possibility of an attack on Iran. Which wouldn't fall instantly like Afghanistan and have the opium production back up to previous levels under new masters in under a year. And it wouldn't dissolve into civil war like Iraq.

It would...actually, no one know what it would do. Declare war on Israel? Start funding terrorist groups all over the world? Buy nuclear weapons from the Russian Federation? All the above? No one can say, but it would be bad. That's "bad" the same way the pacific ocean is "moist".

If you want an alternative view of the debate, from people who do this stuff all the time, go here. I'm sure you'll find it balanced and diplomatically phrased.

Oneirology

“An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful."
- George Orwell

One evening, when I was seven or eight, walking home from school, I nearly died.

I was walking past some scaffolding, against a building that was presumably being repaired. It was late summer, the sun was hot, and the workers must have gone home early because there was no one on the scaffold.

A half brick hit the ground with a loud clunk, a few inches to my left, and broke in two. If I'd been walking on a slightly different part of the pavement, I think it would have killed me.

I stood still a moment in surprise, and anger that some unseen person on the scaffold had been so careless. Then continued my walk home, pondering my own mortality.

About a decade ago, I slipped and fell from the spiral staircase in my home, landing painfully on my back, my head narrowly missing a lump of broken plaster.

Shaken, and not sure what else to do, I took myself off for a walk, discovering a new part of town that I'd never seen before.

The incident with the half brick really happened, but I can't be sure how much is memory and how much invention, because I don't remember it intensely, and I don't know how aware of death I could have been at that age.

The staircase fall I recall vividly, including how it felt to fall and land. Except it never happened. I've never lived in a place with a spiral staircase. It was a dream.

Now, I almost never remember my dreams, which is probably a good thing because those I do remember are nightmares. I remember the staircase-fall dream now because...

...because I've just awoken from another, similar dream, in which I remembered falling from the staircase and discovering a new part of town. I'm sure I didn't remember the staircase dream when I had it, but now I remember it because I remembered it in another dream - a decade or so after I originally had it.

Yes, I know, maybe I dreamed the memory. Maybe I really did fall from someone's spiral staircase as a child and half remember it, embellishing the memory and misidentifying it as a dream. And maybe there was no falling half brick all those years ago. I have fair certainty, but no proof and no way of knowing.

But this thing of remembering dreams (as reality) in other dreams (taken for reality), with years separating the two - that's happened several times before.

It's as though I have an entire dream personal history (composed mostly of nightmares), which is available to me only when I'm dreaming - except for those rare occasions when (a) I remember a dream and (b) the dream included memories of another dream.

I do not want to explore my own subconscious, uncovering dreams and childhood memories, integrating the insights thereby yielded into my adult waking life as a way to become a happy, well adjusted person.

No, I just want cut out my dreams and much of my childhood with a scalpel and throw them away.

George Orwell once wrote that writers are all deeply selfish and self-absorbed people, driven to write by demons they can't hope to comprehend, let alone deal with.

If so, I really should be a writer.

On Your Marx

I should write something about the Marxism conference. This year, I decided to go to meetings on subjects I don't know anything about.

After years of going to the conference, reading bits and pieces of socialist literature and associating with people who've read a whole lot more, I reckon I can predict the gist of a lot of the meetings. But there's still plenty of subjects I just don't know about.

Here's a selection of meetings in the former group, together with a summery of what I imagine was said:

How Important is Class Today? - Very. In spite of all half-baked theories to the contrary, there's still the two basic classes - ruling and working, the former constantly shrinking and the latter getting more miserable. The smallish managerial (or "middle") class shills for the rulers, but identifies itself and it's values with all humanity.

Will China be the Next Superpower? - Probably, in twenty or thirty years, but we can't be certain.

Has Racism Always Existed? - No. It began as a justification for the slave trade, and mutated into scapegoating on religious or national grounds.

Is Iraq the New Vietnam? - Not really, but there's a few useful parallels.

Who Really Ended Slavery? - Not the anti-slavery campaigners.

Can Identity Politics Help Us Fight the BNP? - Only the same way wearing clogs persuades your friends to learn Dutch.

Walter Benjamin - Philosopher of the Frankfurt school, and more-or-less Marxist. Wrote about pop culture and art.

Cultural Relativism - Isn't it odd how people who say there's no right or wrong never question the market?

Was Marx a Revolutionary? - Duh. But not all marxisms or marxists are.

Where Does Profit Come from? - The worker makes 300 dollars worth of product, and gets paid 100.

What's Wrong with Conspiracy Theories - They're unscientific, and distract from the real issues.

Do Western Workers Benefit from Imperialism? - The same way a slave charged to whip other slaves benefits from slavery.

Can the Working Class be a Force for Change in the Global South? - We bloody well hope so, 'cos if not we're totally frelled.

Marxism and Feminism - Feminists attribute the big problems of the world to it being run by men. Marxists attribute them to it being run by greedy bastards (who tend to be men). Marxists are by definition feminists to the extent that they oppose oppression of women.

Why is Multiculturalism in Crisis? - Because it's a way of saying "I generously tolerate you being different from me, so long as your difference doesn't affect me at all.". Or, because it's part of the problem it thinks it's the answer to.

Is Marxism Anti-religion? - Only when religion is used to oppress.

...and here's some meetings I actually went to:

Islam and Islamic Civilisations - The prophet Mohamed was born around 600CE, when two Arab empires were collapsing and fighting, and the old gerontocratic tribal cultures were dying.

He had a nervous breakdown, saw angels, heard voices and started a religion. Powerful groups found the relgion's message of unity, peace and mutual respect useful, using it as ideological cover for military expansion and reconsolidation of the middle east. Which some might find ironic.

One intriguing tidbit that the speaker brushed past: There are no surviving contemporary accounts of Mohammed's life, and he isn't mentioned in any documents until 125 years after his death.

Compare with Jesus, who isn't mentioned anywhere until 35 years after his death, and whose life story looks greatly like an agglomeration of older legends. There's no reason to suppose Jesus Christ the man existed. Is it possible Mohamed is also a retrospective fiction?

Latin America - A New Kind of Revolution? - I walked into this one not knowing what the title meant, and left still not knowing. What I do know is, the nationalist Independence movements in Bolivia and Venezuela are still getting stronger, they are focused on quality of life as well as self determination, and Hugo Chavez is a very mixed bag indeed.

I also know the speaker made herself very unpopular by accusing the audience of romanticising the working class.

Beethoven - Compared with slightly older composers like Hadyn, whose work is staid background music for aristocrats, Beethoven's is proud and assertive, reflecting the optimistic and individualistic values of the new bourgeois class.

Africa Before the Slave Trade - Everyone knows Africans used each other as slaves long before Europeans used them. What isn't known is there were many types of slavery, most had tenure limits, and slaves had rights.

Apart from that, Africa has had an absolutely dizzying array of shifting borders, intermixing language groups and some notably civilised empires in 6000 years of history. If I ever get a spare decade, I might be able to study some of it.

Marxism and Rubbish - A whimsical presentation from sci-fi author China Mieville, aka The Sexiest Man in Politics. Waste disposal is big business - there is 70 times more waste produced by heavy industry than by all other sources put together, much of it is amazingly toxic, and the governments of 3rd world countries are selling their land as dumping grounds for it. No recycling, no processing, and whole communities live on it and in it.

Rather than bang on about how evil capitalism is for doing this, Mieville asked how artists could represent and interpret the reality, without falling into the old traps of turning piles of rubbish into towers of benign beauty, or turning the tip dwellers into heroic figures living outside the system.

Tolerance as a Political Category - My favourite Yugoslavian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek holding forth to an audience of a thousand. He began by pointing out how tolerance in itself is nothing more than the powerful refraining from hurting the powerless, and what's needed instead is a removal of the power imbalance.

This is old news, but he somehow segued into how the political left in the west has failed to update its theories to cover the last thirty years of change - which is contentious but IMO partly true.

And then he ended by saying it's the task of intellectuals to radicalise the slum dwellers. Which is, um, an interesting thing to say.

I travelled up to the conference in the back of a furniture van, helped set up an art exhibition there, slept on the floor of a community centre (with 30 young Kurdish men, which was very nice), ate nothing but pasta salad, got blisters and sunburn, somehow managed to gain a pound in weight and lose an MP3 player, got rather drunk in the evenings, fell very briefly in love and travelled home in a slow, bumpy train.

Same again next year?

Super Truther

After I die, I want to be reincarnated as a conspiracy theorist. That way, I could spend years burying myself in the minutiae of newspaper reports, eyewitness testimony, chemical tests, and obscure facts about weather balloons, ballistics and train timetables...without ever having to get involved in the real world.

How nice to be lost in a haze of suggestive recondrite contradictory factoids, and communicate only with people who share my obsessions, hermetic and hermitlike.

They say the twin towers collapsed vertically, just like in a controlled demolition of a towerblock. Except that in controlled demolitions, each part of the building is in simultaneous freefall, whereas when the towers collapsed the upper levels fell onto the lower, like vertical dominoes.

The steel frame of the tower might weaken enough to collapse if heated by enough jet fuel on fire. But there wasn't such a fire. Except some footage suggests there was. And in any case steel doesn't suddenly weaken when it reaches a certain temperature - it happens progressively.

The "third" tower was undamaged until it suddenly collapsed. Except it was actually badly damaged on the other side. Some witnesses said they saw a missile, and others a non-commercial plane hit the towers - though most didn't.

Why did the ambulance carrying Diana Spencer take forty five minutes to get to a hospital twelve minutes away? Unless it was actually thirty minutes and had a breakdown. Unless the breakdown was faked to give time to perform an abortion and (badly?) cover up evidence of pregnancy.

What happened to the mysterious white car, just how fast was Diana's car really travelling, was the driver drunk, was he that drunk, did the lights in the subway fail and was that deliberate?

According to Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", it would take a minimum of fourteen seconds to fire three shots from the bookstore where Oswald worked. The FBI put the figure more around seven seconds. So does this make a difference? And did the rifle have a defective sight or not? And was Oswald a good marksman or not? And is it possible to shoot through that much tree cover?

Was it Oswald shot Tippet, and if so how did he get to that crime scene in however many minutes it was, why did he double back and how did the police know where to find him? And if Jack Ruby was an agent why did he die in jail?

"9/11 Truthers", as they like to be known, are obviously right when they say the war on terror is just as big a fraud as the war on drugs, invading Iraq is about keeping oil in American industries and out of Chinese ones, and the threat from terrorists is at best exaggerated.

They're also right most of the time to disbelieve anything their government wants them to believe, and to hold the most cynical expectations of the CIA and military.

The details dug up by the best truthers are highly intriguing, and the arguments over the science fascinating. But it all boils down to one question: What kind of government agency would threaten the lives of its own colleagues and bosses, its political leaders, and its corporate associates for the sake of a giant propaganda stunt?

Is this scenario plausible?

The CIA, or some group within it, or some other government organisation, plans a wave of invasions of the middle east to secure oil supplies, and needs to manufacture some justification.

They decide that destroying the twin towers and blaming it on the middle east would do the job. They know that the towers are a major hub of the corporations which control the government and dictate the need to secure oil supplies in the first place. But what the hell, it'll look great on TV.

They also decide that destroying the white house would add to the justification. Who's in the white house they might not want to kill? No one much. Or let's be charitable and say they only decide to fake an attempt to do it.

And finally they decide on the best justification of all - an attack on the pentagon itself, hopefully killing many of their colleagues for maximum effect.

They sit back and ask themselves: would these events justify a war? And they answer yes.

Then they ask: is there some other way the war could be justified? It's late and they're tired, so they answer no.

Then: Aren't we going to kill a load of our co-workers, friends and superiors? They shrug and say "ce la vie".

And finally: What will the rest of the CIA (or whoever) do to us if/when they find out what we've done? They smile nervously and say "No one will ever find out. We're safe".

Not really.

For what it's worth, I think the British royal family could adapt to the ex-wife of the third in line to the throne having a muslim child - if indeed she was going to have one - without calling in the James Bond squad. Though others say I underestimate the racism of these people.

I think the CIA were quite capable of publicly killing their own nominal commander-in-chief for some reason that would seem trivial now. As were the mafia, and maybe the KGB or even a team whackjobs who met at the NRA and were amazingly lucky to get away with it.

I think Bob Marley did die of cancer, Tchaikovsky was not in a suicide pact, Rasputin wasn't gay, the Bilderberg group are a private club not a secret society, Robert Maxwell probably wasn't a MossAd agent, Jeff Rense is immensely gullible, David Icke is mentally ill...and floridation has no effect on either dental health or brain chemistry.

Preach It

I was going to stop eating biscuits and start exercising today. But yesterday I injured my knee and ate something that doesn't like my stomach. So on the one hand I can't exercise, but on the other I can't eat anything because I'll just throw it up.

You can see how some people think their lives are run by an invisible power with the sense of humour of a five year old.

Speaking of which, I've found myself thinking about God recently. I'm working on the outlines of a story about murder in a small religious cult, and posting about atheism on one of the more sensible religious discussion blogs.

I'll post quotes from the latter if/when it develops some more. In the meantime, here's some notes from the former. Imagine these words coming from one of the characters, a rather unconventional charismatic preacher:

There are those who believe that by giving the people what they want, they are doing what must be done.

There are those who believe that by doing what must be done, they are making the people happy.

And there are those who believe that by making the people happy, they are giving the people what they want.

But these are very different things.
If god started to answer our prayers, we would soon cease praying. Praying is a way of hoping for what we know we will never have.

They say man is defined by language, or work, or the use of tools. They say man is the only creature to think in words, or work the land, or invent technology. I say man is defined by his capacity for hope. I say he is the only creature to live for the future.

The future barely ever comes of course, and almost all hope is futile. If the future does come, or our prayers are answered, we instantly find something new to pray for.
Revelations are meant to be experienced by lunatics, quoted by the holy, and revered by the believers. They're not meant to be understood by anyone.

We don't care about the content of the revelation, only that there is one. We're supposed to be reassured by its existence, not informed by its data.
Every community needs its scapegoats, every religion needs its heretics, and every man needs his enemies.

If we weren't drawn together by our shared hatred, do you think our love for each other would be enough? If all we had was our love, we'd soon find reasons to hate each other.
It could be the wealthy in their semi-detatched homes with tripple glazing, or the poor in their cracked towerblocks which are only a mile away but which we've never seen. It could be the young, the mad, the clever,

The beautiful who have nothing but their beauty, or the ugly who would trade everything they have to have beauty. The good and kind who we despise for being better than us, or the spiteful and cruel who we despise for doing what we wish we could do.

the foreign with their strange food which they cook for us in the evenings, the immigrant who steals the job we don't want for wages we wouldn't accept. The criminals who scare us, or the police who treat us like criminals.

We live among these people but they are invisible to us. If they were not invisible we could not hate them as we do. Or if we love them, we couldn't love them as we do.
At the end of every religious quest there is an empty box. The box that the holy books say contains the greatest secret, the deepest revelation, the complete truth.

We open the box and see there's nothing there, but instead of blaming god or the scriptures for deceiving us, we blame ourselves for being too blind to see the contents. We tell ourselves we have not yet reached enlightenment, and are therefore not worthy to receive enlightenment.

If we see through this, we tell ourselves the real purpose of the quest was the journey itself, that the difficulties and waylays on the path are the true source of enlightenment, that the box is not empty after all because we fill it ourselves with each step. Indeed, the box is irrelevent, merely an excuse.

But we can't tell anyone what we've learned on the journey, because for anyone to understand it, they'd have to take the journey themselves. And even if they do, they've taken their journey, not ours, and receieved their enlightenment, not ours, so we can't even compare our vision of god with theirs.

Some even say your whole life is the quest, so when you've reached the end of your life, you'll know how you should have spent it.

It's perfect. The box stays empty, the truth stays hidden, the mystery stays intact, priests stay in control and the pligrims keep coming.

Turquoise

Green issues are red hot. Sort of.

With two weeks to go before the local council elections, Portsmouth's green group last night organised a hustings for representatives of standing parties to present their environmental cases and credentials. Five parties thought it was important enough to send speakers, who found themselves addressing thirty.

Everyone knows the planet's in trouble, everyone knows something drastic has to be done right now, everyone knows politicians have to be involved, but no one wants to do anything drastic and no one wants to talk with politicians.

On the platform:

* Labour Guy. Most professional politicians have to adopt a schizoid approach to their party, loyally defending policies they reject, working for leaders who betray them, and presenting arguments they can see through.

This fellow was more honest than most about the tensions between the principles his party is (supposedly) based upon and the policies it actually follows. This was partly because he really was in a conflicted state, and partly because playing the reluctant advocate gave him an air of plausible deniability.

It's a neat trick - much as hollywood can continue to tell the same tired old stories by giving them a thin gloss of postmodern irony, so some politicians can continue to support their discredited party by loudly protesting that they don't really. A way of having your cake while pretending not to eat it.

* Green Guy. Less conflicted, more knowledgeable about both green issues and politics, and much more able to say one thing while meaning another. Your average slippery local councillor.

Unfortunately for him, drowning difficult questions in waffle and smearing opponents in falsely parenthetical remarks didn't work with this audience. Attacking leftwingers by characterising them as hardfaced stalinists only works when played to listeners ignorant of the real history, defocusing issues only works with unfocused people, and spouting cliches only works with people who think in cliches.

* Respect Guy. Began nervous, halting and earnest. By the end he cam across as clearly the most honest, straightforward and trustworthy speaker on the floor.

* Chair. You meet some interesting blends of psychological types in politics. In this case, a campaigner who tries to avoid conflict, a proselytising leader who doesn't want to stand out or dominate, and a climate scientist advocating economic reforms he knows won't solve the problems in the long term, in the hope they'll be stepping stones to major reforms that will.

* Tory Guy. A lame duck with nothing to say, gamely saying it to people he knows aren't listening. Like Labour Guy, he tried to play the "loyal but independent" role.

Also something of a twit. Twice he presented the slogan "Think global, act local" as though it were a fresh new idea liable to impress progressives. He thought it was invented by Woking Town Council.

* LibDem Guy. His spiel was "I'm just an ordinary fluffy liberal campaigning on social issues, who somehow fell into being a local councillor". It's odd how some professional politicians think they'll seem more trustworthy to the electorate if they present themselves as goofy amateurs. Or rather, it's odd how they're right to think this.

As for the debate itself, it ranged over transport issues (car culture, public transport funding, and why not everyone can convert their cars to run on chip fat), housing (enforcing building regulations, why the poor have ineffective double glazing, and how planning application procedures are a complete and utter blithering mess), and how if only the public were more educated they'd put more pressure on their politicians.

Then, as is traditional, the greens in the audience went home and the reds went down the pub - with Labour Guy in tow. Cue a continuation of the same debate, but this time honest and interesting.

Being Mean About the Green Scene

Al Gore is promoting a pop concert to raise awareness of climate change. There'll be big name stars getting big ratings and giving the big picture on the biggest of big issues.

On face of it, it's a good idea, Most of the target audiance have a deep distrust of politicians, manifested as political defeatism, but a passion for music and celebrity.

Going a little deeper, I have to ask: Surely anyone whose awareness can be raised has already had it raised?

There are those who will always deny the inconvenient truth because it scares them so much. They'll always be able to latch on to some half-understood pseudosciene to justify their fearful complacency.

There are those who profit in the short term from environmental destruction, and these can always invent paper thin rationalisations - including the notion that it's already too late, so why bother?

There are those who see the problem as too large to solve, so reconceptualise it as vastly smaller issues around low energy lightbulbs, loft insulation and recycled coke cans.

A subtype of these are those who defer action by preaching that children must be educated into green awareness, because the children own the future and they need to ensure their children don't inherit a ruined earth blah blah blah.

There's the campaigners who think it's all about saving this or that species of fluffy animal from extinction, or making plane tickets more expensive. Or raising taxes to punish people who are too poor to move out of their old, ungreen, underclass homes.

None of these types will be persuaded by a green pop concert - or even twenty green pop concerts. They'll make some thought-terminating remark about the electricty for the event coming from burning coal. Even if they go to the concert themselves - probably driving there in an SUV.

No, such people will never listen, so there's no point in talking to them. The concert is aimed squarely at keeping the embryonic movement going. And in it's current state - small, timid, ideologically confused, composed of groups with incompatible aims and beliefs, and held together only by the vaguest of common interest - it needs all the solidarity it can generate.

So yes, it is a good idea. Just not for the stated reasons.

As above, so below. Here in Portsmouth we have a "Climate Awareness Event", created by PCAN - the Portsmouth Climate Action Network. A day of stalls, workshops, talks and films, followed by an evening barbeque (with vegan option) and a night of live music.

One thing good socialists are good at is working with people we think are quite wrong in all ways execept the most important - especially the kind of trendy-liberal middle-class greener-than-thou hippies who inevitably dominate events like these.

Which is odd really, because working with people who disagree with them on details is something that trendy-liberal middle-class greener-than-thou hippies are extremely bad at.

And I'm not even a very good socialist. But I'll be there.

Health (Part 2)

My cold is dragging out, and now both parents have it. MY brother has been ill with something similar since christmas. C is living on beecham's powders. John M is convalescing from a small heart attack.

It doesn't help that the air is cold, light levels are low and the sky is a sick shade of grey. It's like the world itself has the flu.

I had an doctors appointment today to hear the results on a raft of blood tests. Short version: cholesterol, pressure, sugar and everything else is fine, so my getting out of breath from climbing a flight of stairs is simply down to being unfit. But I did get a prescription of antibiotics for the cough.

GlaxoSmithKline are finally being sued over their antidepressant Paroxetine - trade name Seroxat. According to some leaked memos, they knew from their own trials that it had at best no effect on depression, and sometimes actually increased suicidal tendencies in the test subjects.

Twelve years ago I went to see a counsellor about depression. He wasn't very interested until I mentioned I was gay - then he spent half an hour trying to persuade me I wanted to abduct young boys. From talking to other people, I now know this kind of practice from counsellors is quite common.

Eventually he agreed to refer me to a specialist about depression. The specialist turned out to be psychiatrist who worked with paedophiles. But he, seeing what had happened, referred me to a third man who specialised in depression.

This man prescribed me an antidepressant newly on the market. It was called Paroxetine, and apparently it had none of the usual side effects. So, no dizziness, nausea, strange thoughts and dreams, vagueness of intellect, impotence etc.

Except it had all these effects, and made no impact on the depression. I was young enough and stupid enough to let the doctor persuade me it would work eventually.

It's difficult now to describe how the drug made me feel. Slow, muzzy, disconnected. Ill but apathetic and will-less. Rather like having a permanent headcold, ironically. I spent four years on various dosages of this drug, wandering dreamlike through courses in computing and theology, plus a really bad relationship and a consequent prison term. There was at least one seriously incompetent suicide attempt, but details of the entire period are very hazy.

I threw away all my pills at age 27, together with most of the junk in my head about counsellors, doctors, academia and relationships.

And now it's finally come out that GSK knew all about the effects of Seroxat, but put it on the market anyway, selling it as the safe new wonderdrug.

Nonevent

I suppose I should say something about the execution of Saddam Hussein.

This was meant to be the great crow of triumph for the American government. This was supposed to be what the whole occupation was about - toppling the hated dictator, making him pay for his crimes, and freeing the Iraqi people to develop two-party elections and eat bigmacs.

Instead, we get pictures of a broken man with a noose round his neck, and no progress. No economy, no oil, and no one knows how many factions, including one puppet government, still mass killing each other, with no end in sight.

Everyone realised it was inevitably a showtrial - indeed there were only token efforts to portray it as anything else. Everyone knew it would end with a death sentence. And pretty much no one had a problem with the justness of that.

The only point of disagreement is over how much influence the American government had over the trial conducted by the Iraqi government it created. Were they pulling a few strings behind the scenes, or all of them openly?

It's interesting the Americans felt the need to exert any pressure at all. Did they imagine any of the Iraqi people - even those who benefited from his regime - seriously wanted the dictator around? A dictator has no loyal supporters - only temporary allies with knives.

Statements by politicians have all followed the same line - essentially: "The death penalty is part of Arab culture, but not western culture. But tolerance is a western virtue, so we westerners tolerate their barbarism in this case, because he deserved it."

There are people who swallow the line, but only by coating it in palliative terms like "sovereign nation", "free court" and "lawful process", until there's no content left.

When it comes time to write the history of this Iraq war, the execution will be a footnote. I suspect the bulk of the tome will concern the protracted many-sided civil wars that only start properly when America leaves.

After declaring victory, of course.

Dialect Talk

Dialectics is one of the two theoretical pillars of marxism, the other being Materialism. Taken together, they are known as Dialectical Materialism.

Materialism is the idea that the real world is a solid, consistent place, existing independent of our thoughts, governed by physical laws and definable forces. Knowledge comes from practical interaction with the real world, not from political authority, religious revelation, or armchair speculation.

Dialectics is the theory of how this material world changes, not abruptly in jumps, but constantly and smoothly. This means the categories we use to conceptualise the world break down because when something is partway through a process of change, it straddles two or more incompatible categories, giving it a blurred, undefined feel.

Dialectics is conceived as a form of reasoning that both includes and supersedes aristotelian logic, goes further than multivalent and fuzzy logics, and describes not just the way the physical or social world changes, but any form of change.

Most marxists either embrace dialectics and use it extensively, or ignore it and get on with campaigning. A few though, actively reject it while still calling themselves marxists, and someone going under the name Rosa Lichtenstein is one of these.

She(?) argues that the failure of marxism to become a significant force in either academia or the political arena is due to several factors, one major factor being the acceptance and use of dialectics by marxists.

On the introductory page of her site, she makes a number of related points:

Given the fact that dialecticians assure us that truth is tested in practice, and that "materialist dialectics" is the main-spring of all they do, this can only mean that their 'theory' has been tested and shown to fail.

Firstly, marxists have never claimed that dialectics is the sole wellspring of their ideas and actions. To build a bridge you need both mathematics and steel - each is useless on it's own. Likewise to act politically you need both a sound method of analysis and a lot of people - and even then, success can be partial, or nonexistent.

Secondly, her popperian reading only works, even in strictly popperian terms, if she can show that the acceptance or rejection of dialectical reasoning was the sole determining factor in all (or any) past defeats. That, for instance, the failure of attempts by the German left to stop the rise of naziism were a test of the dialectic, and of nothing else.

Oh, and thirdly, she seems to think that overthrowing all the governments of the world and replacing them with worker's states is the only goal of marxism, and because this has not happened there have been no successes.

...there is a close connection between the class-origin of the ideas found in DM and the rabidly sectarian nature of revolutionary politics.

I take this to mean that marxists are mostly middle class, and Dialectical Materialism is a doctrine which both stems from and legitimises the worldview of this class.

It may (or may not) be true that most leaders of marxist groups and movements are middle class - in the marxist sense of the term, obviously. Lichtenstein seems to think being middle class predisposes you to thinking in terms of blurred boundaries and shifting categories. In my experience, the opposite is true.

dialectics is an important part of the reason why revolutionary groups are in general vanishingly small, neurotically sectarian, studiously unreasonable, consistently conservative, theoretically deferential (to 'tradition'), and almost invariably tend toward all forms of substitutionism.

Substitutionism is the notion that, seeing as the workers aren't engaged in the struggle that's in their interests, we've got to do it for them. It is a common pseudomarxist idea among small marxist organisations.

It's certainly true that marxist groups tend to be small, authoritarian and given to fighting each other. But it's a complete mystery to me why belief in the dialectic should be the cause of this.

Differential Calculus is a branch of mathematics which deals with change in a way that resembles dialectical logic, but we don't see organisations of mathematicians publishing screeds against each other or expelling members for expressing doubts.

A lot of christian groups behave like the revolutionary cadres Lichtenstein talks about - but there's nothing dialectical about their beliefs.

...all the major theses advanced by dialecticians do not stand up to close scrutiny.

I can't comment on this yet, because I haven't yet read Lichtenstein's close scrutiny.

the criticisms dialecticians make of Formal Logic and the so-called 'Law of Identity' are as ill-informed as they are misconceived.

This is just silly. If you want to know about First-Order Logic, Aristotelian syllogism theory, or the work of Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Tarski and Quine, ask a marxist who's made extensive study of dialectical logic.

...bitter experience over the last twenty-five years 'debating' with the DM-faithful tells me I am talking to Marxists with stoppered ears.

In other words, "They don't listen to me because they're scared". I'll have to reserve judgement on this one.

Three billion or more workers cannot be wrong; we can't keep blaming our failure on their "false consciousness". Dialectics is not the "world-view of the proletariat", since they know nothing of it, never have, and never will.

Strawman. No one has ever claimed the workers are instinctively dialectical. To say that marxism is derived from what is in the interests of the workers is not to say it comes from what the workers are interested in.

Lichtenstein expands on a justifies these points in many essays, and promises many more to come. I'm not terribly impressed with the arguments she gives in the overview, but I'll be reading more of her work when there's time.

Dialectology (so to speak) is a surprisingly neglected field, given how central it is to several schools of philosophy. Chris Arthur has written articles and a book on the subject, and there's John Rees' "Algebra of Revolution", plus of course works by Engels. I think we could use more, and Rosa Lichtenstein is one of the few writing about it.

As a footnote, a google search on Chris Arthur (Who I met briefly at a conference on...dialectics) bumped me into this this site. Myths and legends of Marxism - looks promising.

Nineteen Eighty Four

When I was growing up in the 1980s, the newspapers were full of three subjects: Gay men (who were evil), AIDS (which was terrifying), and Russia (which was evil and terrifying). A quick glance over the day's lead stories gave me a sense of deja vu.

The 'papers and TV are still full of gay men and their sexuality, though being a queen has gone from being Every Parent's Nightmare to Youth Fashion Accessory. Gay men are now celebrated in the media - so long as they're young, attractive, wealthy, witty and completely vacuous.

The mantle of Every Parent's Nightmare has shifted from "your child being abducted by a psychotic poof" to "your child having a sexuality". Children being molested by adults, children losing their "innocence" by seeking sex with adults, children having sex with children - three separate objects of contemporary fear that have coalesced into a nebulous terror of kidsex.

Then, as now, the media was full of pretty underage children, singing, dancing, chatting and being cool. And then as now the kids were shown as sexy, but never actually sexual. A 12 year old girl could lipsync with lipstick through a pop song about lust on primetime TV, but unlike older female singers really was Like a Virgin.

Now though, there's an extra layer of irony, as pubescent (and sometimes prepubescent) children continue to be presented as deniably sexy, but instead of ignoring the sexiness like the elephant in the room everyone painfully refuses to think about, it's an object of paranoia.

Kids are expected to be (a) alluring, (b) unconscious of it and (c) chaste. As opposed to chased.

Today was World AIDS Day. The time is long past when, 20 years ago, the headmaster of my school could tell the class "AIDS is a disease caused by man's immorality". It's gone from being the Gay Plague, to the Damocles sword hovering above us all, to the ravage of Africa, to...what?

It may no longer be a death sentence in the industrial west, but transmission rates are still high, there's still no vaccine or cure, and ARC can still make life unbearable - as can the side effects of the drugs used to treat it. Of course, if you don't live in a privileged part of the world, it's much simpler - half the people you know have HIV, and death from AIDS is commonplace.

When the TV asks me to remember on World AIDS Day, I'm not sure what I'm being asked to remember. A decade of young men dying horribly? That much could have been prevented if Regan and Bush Mk 1 hadn't been homophobes? AIDS babies in Africa? The economic causes of the African situation? Or just that the disease hasn't gone away, isn't going to go away, and there's still no cure.

Remember Cold War fever? The idea that there's a gigantic nation of brainwashed fanatics who hate western freedoms and want to enslave the world? Of course, no one could possibly fall for tripe like that nowadays, could they. We're all much too sophisticated and cynical.

Ah well, it looks like the Russians are officially scary again. After an obscure dissident in exile was killed with polonium after decades of ineffectually criticising each Russian government in turn, and now a second dissident may have been poisoned, the fingers of blame point to Putin and the outfit formerly known as KGB.

The Blair government reacted in typical fashion, promoting a mobile clinic for members of the public who feared Russian spies might be trying to assassinate them. And a slightly confused BBC reported that alpha radiation had been found in the second man's urine, and radiation should be kept away from open wounds. The absurd and the illiterate.

Five planes and a luxury hotel are being swept for radioactivity, and the vague notion that Russia is in some way dangerous to the Free World is bubbling under the surface again.

New dross, same as the old dross.

SWPAPCDA (PS)

The Socialist Worker's Party Annual Pre-Conference District Aggregate Meeting for Portsmouth and Southampton. Which is a little more interesting that it sounds, and happened tonight.

Aside from the usual telling each other what we already know (it's difficult juggling several campaigns simultaneously, the imperialist project in the middle east is ongoing, and recruiting young people is important), there was also discussion of work in trade unions, and the climate change movement.

The party line on the environmentalist movement is that it's too fragmented, too nebulous, and most importantly too small to be worth diverting more resources into working with. It's also too...well, silly - or if you prefer: politically naive, unsophisticated, not well thought out. If that changes, so will our involvement.

Iraq (plus Afghanistan) is still the major issue in the public mind, and in spite of the US plan to slowly withdraw from Iraq, there's no plans to leave Afghanistan and there's still the wish to attack Iran - even while negotiating with Iran and Syria to mend Iraq.

I'm not sure. I suspect the will is draining out of the antiwar movement (and thus the Stop The War Coalition) now that the war feels like it's "over, bar the shooting". Occupation and killing are still happening of course, but large antiwar demos may have gone the way of the blind patriotism they opposed.

On the one hand, the future of the planet is too important an issue for us to sit and wait for a mass movement to appear that we can try to influence. On the other, we can't create such a movement out of thin air just by getting involved, however much energy we put into it.

In fact, pulling out all the stops might actually damage the movement, by driving away the fluffy people and single-issue campaigners - i.e the sympathetic but soft general public.

So, it looks like we've just got to wait and hope. Even though time and hope aren't things the world has much of.

Cauchemar

This entry is more personal than most, and more uncomfortable to write. It might indicate something important, or it might mean nothing at all.

I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do they're almost always a certain kind of nightmare. But they're not about fear, they're about frustration. Failure and endless deferment.

The earliest dream I can remember is from when I was about 7 years old. I was in the house of my father's parents, climbing the stairs to get to the top, where there was the room I usually slept in when I stayed over.

In reality there were three flights to climb, with a certain faded green carpet and white painted banisters all the way up. But in the dream, at the end of each flight, there was another, and another, each with the same carpet and banisters. It was as though the house grew another storey with each flight of stairs I climbed, so I never got to the top, just kept on climbing endlessly. I had this dream several times.

There was another from a year ago, where I was in an airport. I was trying to find a shop where I could buy some food, before taking a flight to emigrate somewhere, to escape some impending catastrophe. But all the shops were shutting, and as I searched further and further afield in the airport to find one that was open, I got increasingly lost in corridors. And with each new turning I tried, the walls got higher, and more featureless, and there were fewer people around.

Eventually, all the walls were a towering uniform grey and I was alone. One detail - I'd forgotten my passport, so couldn't catch a plane anyway.

I can't count how many corridors I've walked through, or how many rooms I've been in that expanded at every turn, yet still lacking the one thing or person I was looking for. There's always some errand that I need to carry out, and the more I try, the more obstacles I have to deal with, and the more distant it's completion becomes.

That's the basic theme, with small variations. These dreams often recur, and occasionally even intersect when one frustrated errand from the past runs through on a TV screen or monitor that I can see while trying to complete another one. Oh yes, it's like watching a video recording, and I'm dimly aware that I'm inside one dream watching another.

The symbolism is obvious - endless frustration, repetition, and being trapped. I don't often remember the hallucinations of sleep, but when I do, it seems I've been mostly having the same dream my entire life.

She's Not There

Somewhere in his writings, Jaques Lacan talks about the man who owns a flash sports car, driving it on a deserted road. The man puts his foot down on the accelerator, showing just how fast his car can go. But who is he trying to impress? There's no one except himself there.

Why can we identify with films like The Truman Show and The Matrix? Why does mental illness so often take the form of conspiracy theories - or the belief that you're being watched and controlled by unseen forces? Why is it embarrassing to sing at the top of your voice, even when it's your job to do so?

In one of the comic "diary" novels about Adrian Mole, the teenager is left alone in the house one day. He plays his records at top volume and has a bath with the door open, just because he can.

But there are many things he could have done - climb up and down the stairs endlessly for hours, eat a bowl of catfood, watch TV, write poetry, or use a razorblade to cut words into his skin. All these things he's free to do for the day, with no consequences. He could explore his temporary freedom in any number of ways, but the ways he chooses are quite specific.

He's very aware that there's no one to watch him take a bath, so it doesn't matter whether the bathroom door is open or closed. Yet he specifically and deliberately leaves it open, as though not just to explore his freedom, but to demonstrate both the freedom and the exploration. It's as though he were letting someone see what he can do when there's no one there to see.

So who is he showing off his freedom to? Himself? In a sense, yes, but that's not the whole story. He's watching himself break a few minor social rules, but watching himself as though from outside himself. There is an imaginary fragment (or duplicate) of himself, standing just outside the bathroom, looking in, watching Adrian Mole display his nakedness to that fragment.

But the boy in the bath can go much further in rule breaking than he ever would if it were another person standing outside, because the fragment is himself. He is both split in two and unsplit - one person with two viewpoints feeding to the same mind. He needs to be split because without the split there could be no audience to do the watching. And he needs to be unsplit because the only safe, trustworthy audience is himself.

It's trivially true that we perform to other people. As Desmond Morris remarked in The Naked Ape, a pop fan who screams in delight at a band on the stage might have many emotions if confronted with the band in a quiet room, but they won't scream. Stadium screaming is a communal activity, and it requires the presence of many screamers, who are all aware of each other's participation.

Comedy movies - even unfunny ones - tend to provoke laughter in crowded cinemas, but a DVD watched by half a dozen friends produces less effect, and if watched alone, is generally watched in silence, without even a smile.

The addition of canned laughter to comedy is noticeably ineffective in making home viewers - even in large groups - join in. A studio audience, or a recorded laugh track, aren't part of the viewing group - they're part of the spectacle, though one which isn't part of the comedy itself. Which might explain why is feels so superfluous and annoying.

Being amused ("laughing on the inside") is a sensation. Emitting a succession of loud quaking barks is a communal ritual, done in response sometimes even to jokes which the viewers don't understand - they just know they ought to do it. And the one who refuses to laugh thereby signals to the others that he or she is an outsider.

There's more than one way to perform to an audience which is absent, but given a halfway presence in the mind of the performer. There's no shortage of people who's parents are safely dead and buried, who don't believe in any kind of afterlife from which the spirits of their parents are watching and judging, yet who can't bring themselves to disregard what their parents wanted, even though they desperately want to.

This is performing to a projection of specific people you're highly familiar with - a projection which has control over you, even though you create and animate the projection. But here the performance consists in doing what you don't want to do, or not doing what you do want.

Obviously this applies even if you're completely wrong about what your parents wanted, or would think.

It doesn't have to be the parents. The man in the flash motorcar isn't trying to impress his mum and dad. It doesn't have to be a projection of one's self, or a real person, or an imaginary person. It can be something as vague as "society in general", "folks" or "people who matter". This doesn't mean "every individual on the planet" or "humanity".

I think the generic "they" who watch and judge is actually two separate abstractions of real social groups. The first is one's peers, in the broad sense. The second is the largely hidden but powerful people in one's society. Those you want to like you, and those you know (usually in a vague way) have power over you, even though they don't know who you are, or care about you as an individual. Your own class, and the ruling class, respectively.

The latter is god. Some say each of us creates god in our own image. To some extent this is true, but the god of any society, or group within that society, is it's own ruling class, abstracted and amalgamated.

The former is "people" as in the questions "what would people think?" or "what do people say?". Not the whole species, or even the whole population of your country or your town, but the type of people who, even if don't know or like them, you want to respect you.

So when we perform to an audience of ghosts, there are actually four kinds of ghosts, each with their own demands, which can contradict each other.

The first kind is oneself - the performer using themselves as a mirror. The performer has quite a lot of control over this ghost. Adrian Mole is performing to this.

The second is a projection of certain important people in one's own life - past or present. Parents, lovers, friends, comrades, offspring, employers etc. This ghost is harder to control, and less well defined. Our friend living in the shadow of his dead parents is in thrall to these ghosts.

The third is "people like me", homogenised into a single, featureless viewer that surrounds on all sides. This one is harder still to control, and even more abstract. Our man in the motorcar is trying to impress this ghost.

And the fourth is the most abstract, most difficult to conceptualise, most encompassing and surrounding, and most difficult to fight against. It is not composed of individual powerful people, but has their common in interests and demands - whether it is the monarchy, priesthood, elders, or corporate multimillionaires depends on the society.

We all spent most of our lives performing to this ghost - so much that usually, we don't even realise we're doing it.

Oh My God! It's...Horrible!

This essay began as a response to a comment, but it grew somewhat.

Why is it, when Fritz Lang makes a film about the dehumanising effect of homogenised industry and corporate control, but sets it in the future, the result is credited as a major classic? But when he makes a film on the same theme, setting it in the present and showing the effects instead of hinting at them, some people get embarrassed? Metropolis is praised, but M is quietly ignored.

Abel Ferrara's film Driller Killer is about a man who kills a lot of other men with a portable electric drill. Except it isn't. The film chronicles the slow psychological cracking of an artist faced with the prospect of bankruptcy and homelessness, which when it finally happens results in a stream of frantic murders.

Anyone who watches it expecting a gorefest will be disappointed - there is some blood in the final half hour, after an hour's dissection of one man's quiet desperation.

David Lynch's Eraserhead is another film about a man being slowly driven insane by an intolerable situation. In this case, the protagonist is trapped in a marriage with a deformed baby, neither of which he ever wanted or knows how to handle.

The Medusa Touch is a supernatural thriller with horror elements. Richard Burton stars as a man who clearly sees and boldly writes about the corruption of politics and the hypocrisy of everyday life. He can telekinetically influence the world, but finds he can only create disasters - suicide, car accident, a plane crash etc.

Of course, it might be argued that these are exceptions to a general rule. That a very few horror films transcend the limitations of the genre - becomming significant and worthy in their own right. That they say something worthwhile in spite of, and in no way because of, their horror status.

And it's certainly true that the vast majority of horror movies are utter tripe, without even pretention to be serious. There's hundreds of flicks concerning a group of teenagers trapped in a house in the middle of nowhere, at the mercy of a motiveless psychopath who gruesomely kills them one by one. There's hundreds of others about Dracula sucking the blood of nubile virgins, or indeed nubile lesbian vampires sucking the blood of equally nubile brides.

The first thing to say is that this is just Sturgeon's Law operating - 95% of anything is crap. How much science fiction is actually worth watching? How many medical dramas or sitcoms don't insult the intelligence? This is uncontroversial.

But the second thing is that giving special pleading to specific horror films as transcending the genre misses the point. The argument that a few of them are redeemed by containing some worthy non-horror elements contains the implicit assumption that horror elements themselves are bad by definition.

Which in effect argues that a good horror film is a good film which has been contaminated with horror, and that if the horror were to be extracted, a worthy film would remain. But this reasoning doesn't stand up.

What would The Exorcist be without the horror? I don't mean "what would be left if the gore, vomit and grotesque makeup were to be excised?". I mean "If the fear, threat and shock were left out, what would remain?"

The Exorcist is a good film - maybe even a great one - and without the horror it could not exist. The horror elements of the film are not peripheral and removable, they are at the core. An innocent child is violated by something powerful that can only hate, but knows your insecurities.

Say we agree that Rosemary's Baby is a good film - not a great one, but good enough to stand up to repeat viewings. Could it hypothetically be remade without the horror? The notion of something malevalent growing where a baby should be, and the sense that everyone else knows what's going on but won't tell you. No, it couldn't - the result of trying wouldn't be a different kind of film, the result would be no film at all.

Apply the same question to The Blair Witch Project, or to science fiction films like Cube or Solaris that borrow from the psychological horror tradition.

In The Wicker Man there's the lurking threat of an elusive conspiracy climaxing with the sheer blind faith of a human sacrifice. In The Omen there's the question - could you kill your baby son, even if he were the devil himself? In Alien, an unstoppable force, immune to reason or compassion it hunting you.

There are even a few 'slasher' horror films - as opposed to the psychological 'nameless menace' and 'fear of the dark' ones - that are good films while still being unanbigiously slashers. Halloween is firmly of the 'teens and psycho' type, yet the opening scene where a brutal killer turns out to be a small boy is a classic.

There are good films about love, war, superheroes, detectives, politics and bank robbers. There are also good films about fear of the unknown, extreme stress and the incomprehensible.

Archive