Tag Archives: violence

Take Churchill, but leave my racist gran out of it

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Statues are kaleidoscopic totems; golems whose frozen faces hold different meanings for different groups of people throughout different points in history. Statues are erected, just as history is written, by the winners, but society is a rolling contract, a constant site of conflict and negotiation, and those at the bottom usually, sooner or later, get their shot at – or the opportunity to fire some shots at – the top-spot. Just ask the French Royal Family circa 1789, or Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath party.

The symbols that once united, may one day divide; the statues that once stood for valiance and jubilation, may one day fall for avarice and hubris. One chunk of sculpted marble can run the gamut from hero to villain and back again over several life-times – that’s if it can manage to avoid being beheaded, blown up or pulled down by chains.

2020 has been a time of great unrest in the world, both biologically and societally. Unrest over the Black Lives Matter movement has swiftly eclipsed the west’s tantrums over coronavirus restrictions, to the point where the coronavirus looks set to join the recently evaporated ghost of Brexit in the shared Ecto-containment units of our collective memory (although I predict a particularly nasty second wave of Brexit at some point in the autumn).

It’s Statuegeddon out there. History is being violently re-framed and re-claimed at home and abroad, both in the media and in the streets. In the US, Columbus and various Confederate generals have borne the brunt of this revisionist violence; here in the UK, the statues of a handful of regionally, but not nationally, well-known colonial ne’er do wells have met their ignominious ends, most notably the likeness of slave-trader Edward Colston, which was wrenched from the ground, marched through the streets and tossed into Bristol harbour.

In the UK, all of this was met with mild indignation on one side and righteous vindication on the other. Until, of course, BLM protestors in London – or at least a handful of those present during demonstrations – turned their attentions to Churchill: the great grand-daddy plinth-pimp; the undisputed Billy Big Balls of the statue world. You’ll no doubt have seen the image of the words ‘IS A RACIST’ spray-painted on the statue’s plinth beneath Churchill’s name. Later in that same day, a man was seen standing atop the cenotaph trying to ignite the Union Jack. Two competing narratives are clashing, like hammers into anvils, and it’s causing sparks.

My paternal grandmother was a life-long supporter of the SNP and Scottish independence, but never-the-less she venerated the arch-conservative Churchill as a God. She wouldn’t hear a bad word said against him. I accepted her view of Churchill wholesale and without criticism, mainly because I was young and hadn’t yet been exposed to any criticism of Churchill the man, but also because my gran had been alive during World War II. She’d spent the early forties living in perpetual fear, worrying about bombs dropping on her town, worrying if she’d ever see my grandfather again, worrying who else in the town wouldn’t be coming back, all the while working her fingers to the bone. I trusted her judgement; her lived experience. I trusted history, at least as I understood it at the time.

Churchill once represented a generation’s shared agony and sacrifice. He stood for imperialism, the old guard, a certain Brutish, British sentiment, yes, but also strength and resolve in the face of a conquering enemy, an enemy that was much worse than anything the world had ever seen before, at least in terms of scale, and military range and capability. He undoubtedly galvanised people’s spirits, fanned the flames of hope.

Now, as the war generation dwindles to a handful of living emblems, there’s sufficient distance to re-evaluate Churchill’s legacy away from the propaganda and old Blighty bluster.

Churchill may well have been an effective rallying force in the fight against Hitler’s eugenocidal expansionism, but looked at through different sets of contemporaneous eyes it’s probably fair to say that he was somewhat lacking in decency and compassion. You know. Just a smidgeon. In fact, he was a bit of an arsehole, even adjusting for the rampant racism and ingrained xenophobia that was reputedly typical of the era.

It’s quite possible that his rousing defence of the Empire was just that: a rousing defence of the Empire, and not really anything to do with repelling fascism which, under certain circumstances, Churchill was more than prepared to admire, especially when it dressed as snappily as Mussolini. And what about those train time-tables? Phwoar, missus.

In 1919 as secretary of state for war Churchill ordered chemical attacks on the Bolsheviks in northern Russia; his strategising was responsible for the out-manned and under-resourced 51st Highland Division being abandoned in France, resulting in the death or capture of some 12,000 Scottish soldiers. And that’s not to forget his part in the decision in 1919 to send tanks and soldiers into Glasgow’s George Square to settle a labour dispute.

Churchill regarded the many subjugated peoples held hostage under the banner of the British Empire as subhuman savages or unruly children, and routinely treated them as such as a matter of policy, particularly the Indians, whom he held in special disregard, a sentiment baldly expressed through his complicity in the Bengal famine, a man-made tragedy that claimed the lives of millions of Indians. This is but a small sample from the dark side of Winston Churchill. It’s hardly exhaustive. Black and tans, claims of Aryan superiority, pillages in South Africa. The list goes on. And on and on.

Had my gran been faced with this list I’m almost certain that it wouldn’t have swayed her from her worship. Churchill was her warrior, her guide, her leader. Who was she to question him, especially when she appeared to agree with many of his underlying assumptions about people from other races?

My grandmother never carried out any genocides – none that I’m aware of anyway – but she was  undoubtedly, em, a wee bit racist. Like many of her generation, she couldn’t understand what people of other races had to complain about. And wasn’t slavery a long time ago anyway? I hear that sentiment echoed, even now. But if white people who never fought in the second world war – who weren’t even alive until years after its end – can say that they are still touched by its, and Churchill’s, legacy – that its importance will continue to be passed down from generation to generation – then why are we so unable to grasp the idea that something as horrific as slavery, still a very recent event in human history, might still cause ripples throughout white and black communities for some time to come. Nobody pushed a big button to end all racism at the moment when slavery was abolished. Some scars take a long time to heal.

My gran wasn’t rabid with her racism. It sometimes felt like she’d received a flyer about the benefits of racism one day, and just thought, ‘Ooooh, that sounds nice.’ She’d never met anyone of colour, and her TV was replete with westerns and war films, all of which helped to reinforce the white-centric status quo. Life was black and white for my gran, sometimes literally. The Japs? Vile. Blacks? Animals. The Red Indians? Savages. Arabs? Never trust them. That last one came straight from my grandfather, who’d served amongst North Africans and middle-easterners during the Second World War and formed a life-long judgement of them as a consequence. Given that during war-time my grandfather was involved with the smuggling and selling on of black-market oil via dealings with the Italian mafia, he wasn’t really well placed to opine on the trustworthiness of any particular person, much less a whole race.

I remember my papa dropping the bombshell on me that he didn’t like black people. He said it almost impassively, barely bothering to take his eyes from the TV. I was around fourteen at the time, and unencumbered by any explicit racist notions – beyond past complicity in the sad trade of unnecessary and uninspired racist jokes at my almost entirely all-white primary school, the punchlines of which featured Twixes, Drifters, chocolate biscuits and red head-dots – and wanted to know why. Why, papa? What have black people ever done to you?

‘I dunno,’ he said with a half-hearted shrug. ‘I just don’t like them.’

Although I wasn’t looking for an Aristotelian exploration of his beliefs and motivations I must confess to feeling a little less than satisfied with his answer.

I pressed him further. ‘What do you mean “you just don’t like them”? There has to be a reason.’

He thought for a moment. A few seconds later he delivered his pay-load.

‘You know how you sometimes don’t like a flavour of ice-cream? It’s like that. I just don’t like them.’

I didn’t have a comeback for that. How could I have? You’ve got to admit, that’s genius racism. Deftly dodging the whole arena of thought and reason to frame his views not intellectually, but emotionally, reducing his racism to a calm statement of preference. It didn’t seem to stem from any visible sense of hatred. Racism for my papa was as simple as saying, ‘Nah, cheers for the offer, but no thanks, I’d rather not.’ Oddly, he seemed to dig Sidney Poitier. Cognitive dissonance writ large.

I did toy with bringing him a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream, and saying, ‘Look, papa. Look at all the different colours – the pink, the yellow and the brown – all sitting happily together, in perfect harmony,’ but I was worried he might scoop out the pink bit and leave the other two by the two-bar fire to melt.

When I was 21 I met a couple of Israeli back-packers in Amsterdam. Really good guys. They saved my life in some ways. One of the duo, Dani, was of Russian ancestry; the other, Ilan, was from Arab stock. A few months later they came to Scotland to visit me. Ilan arrived first. I took him to meet my dad and gran. Now, this was certainly the first time anyone of colour had ever been in my gran’s house, and she reacted as I knew she would: with a sort of fear-soaked, ultra-politeness. She brought through a platter of sandwiches, and I just knew she’d opted for a platter because the serving plate could double as a shield should any shit happen to go down. After all, never trust an Arab, right? In retrospect, as much as I enjoyed dragging my gran into the twentieth century, it wasn’t necessarily fair to put the fear of bloody murder into her old eyes.

She was a lovely woman, my gran, kind and warm, content in her later life to live in her wee town-shaped, Catholicism-scented bubble. That feeling she got when she was finally confronted with the ‘other’ was, I think, the root of her racism, which wasn’t really racism at all, but fear. Pure, undiluted fear. A fear stoked by the people around her, and the newspapers, and the TV shows, and the movies, and by people like her old hero Churchill, who was always more than happy to take a big oily crap on the whole concept of the brotherhood of man.

So what do we do with Churchill now?

I suppose it’s possible to embrace both Churchills: the bold, heroic, no-nonsense, fight-them-on-the-beaches figurehead, and the blood-thirsty, racist tyrant. It’s just a question of how we reconcile those Churchills and choose to remember him as a consequence. Do we really need to venerate him with a statue, and would it really damage his legacy if his statue were to be moved to a museum? On the other hand, are we being too knee-jerk, too revisionist? If we move Churchill to a museum, would he even be safe there? Are the looted treasures of Britain’s museums next on the list for reclamation or obliteration? Should the state cow-tow to violence, however righteous the impetus?

On the other other hand, in the face of a stubborn and indifferent state, isn’t violence sometimes the only mechanism that people have at their disposal to effect change? I don’t think the French Revolution would’ve gotten very far if the marginalised, powerless citizens of Paris had written a series of withering letters to their local feudal representatives.

Maybe, going forwards, if we feel the need to build a statue, we should keep it abstract or symbolic; something that evokes a moment in time rather than a man or a woman of the moment. Because things can change in a moment. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s almost certainly that.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to, or about, Churchill. Perhaps this re-evaluation couldn’t have come at a better time, given that those who moved to defend his statue this past weekend were witnessed giving Nazi salutes and attacking the police, behaviour that stands a little at odds with the virtues they claimed to be in town to defend and uphold.

Whatever we do with Churchill and the murky legacy of Britain’s colonial past, can you do me a wee favour? Leave my gran out of it. She was a good ‘un.

Some of my best friends are grans.

The Hell, Hope and Hilarity of Raising Brothers

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They say, all told, that it’s easier to raise a boy than it is a girl.

Nobody said anything about two boys though…

Nobody said anything about brothers.

I’ve scoured my memory-banks under the sub-headings of ‘real-life’, ‘literature’ and ‘pop culture’, and can only seem to find toxic examples of brotherhood: Cain and Abel, Ronnie and Reggie, Niles and Frasier.

Paul and Barry Chuckle.

About the most innocuous pairing I can think of is Bill and Ben, but even then a) I don’t know if they were even supposed to be brothers, and b) even if they were, they were bouncing plant-pot puppets who said flub-a-dub-a-dib-dob-dib – so that’s not exactly a game-changing chunk of qualitative data.

I’ve got no first-hand experience of having a brother that I can draw upon to help me as a parent. I’m in the dark. I was a brother. Well, I still am a brother, but it’s been almost thirty-years since I last lived under the same roof as my sibling. Also, Ali, my sister, is 8 years older than me, so growing up she was more like a second mother to me – albeit a much, much cooler one – than a sister.

So I guess I don’t have that much proper, conventional sibling experience at all – not in terms of growing up with one, day-to-day, in the same house; especially not with one of a similar age. I’m blind, here… and sometimes, with the things I’ve seen as a parent, I wish I was.

Don’t get me wrong, our two boys – Jack, almost 4; Christopher, 19 months – are capable of generating almost seismic levels of sweetness together; strong enough to trigger a cute-quake in even the withered, hallowed heart of a Home Counties Tory (if the idea of said person having a heart isn’t too much of an oxymoron for you).

Our eldest makes his little brother giggle like something out of a Pampers’ commercial: pulling funny faces, chasing him into and around the garden, and being chased in turn, like they’re trapped in some perpetual, ever-switching Benny Hill chase scene. The little one follows the big one around the house either tottering like a half-drunk penguin, or waddling like a half-pint cowboy who’s been riding on a too-wide horse for too long. It’s absolutely bloody adorable.

Sometimes they sit and play with action figures together, both of them waving the toys about: my eldest constructing elaborate scenarios; his little brother making koosh and badoom and arrggghhhh noises at the times he feels are most appropriate.

At a barbecue recently, Jack used his teeth to cut grapes in two so his little brother could safely eat them. That made us smile. We started to congratulate ourselves on being terrific parents, until we realised that our briefly unsupervised one-year-old could have just as easily choked to death had his brother been in a more experimental mood. That’s what 90 per cent of being a parent is, I suppose: smiling at people in a bid to conceal your very real terror at almost killing your kid again for the 800th time.

In the main, though, they’re good brothers.

They cuddle; they giggle; they wrestle; they kiss.

Sometimes…

Sometimes they do.

…and sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes they can’t be in each other’s company inside the play-room for longer than the time it takes for you to think: ‘I’ll just sit down for five minutes while they’re busy playing, and…’. No sooner have you started to lower your cheeks to the cushion than a shriek slices through the air like a scythe, and either the big one’s thundering out baying for justice because his little brother’s stolen his orange block (and no other colour of block will do, of course. He has to have the orange block, not one of the other 70 blocks, or even another completely different orange block altogether – are you fucking crazy? – the orange one! I want THAT orange one!) or the little one’s galloping out with a blotchy red face, hands held to the heavens, snot and sadness bleeding through his nostrils because his big brother’s just smashed him in the face with a Fisher Price till.

Their behaviour with and towards each other goes from the sublime to the ridiculous almost as often as I resort to hoary old cliches in my writing. For example, the other day I came home to find them fighting over a tissue. Now, if I had a penny for every time I’d caught them fighting over something daft I’d be a millionaire. But a tissue? Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

“DINE!” shouted Christopher.

“No, it’s mine!” shouted Jack, as it rained confetti over them both. “It’s mine, mine, mine!”

“GUYS!” I shouted, trying to startle them into statues. “Some perspective here, please. What if that was a kidney?”

Then I’d be walking into a sitting-room slaughterhouse, I thought.

I know we ask, and perhaps expect, too much of Jack when it comes to sibling decorum. Is it fair to expect a little boy to be the bigger man, especially when he barely comes up to my belly-button? Yes, Jack does indeed dole out a disproportionate amount of the (mild) violence, but Jack is also held to account most often – even when his little brother does indeed ‘start it’ – purely by virtue of his relative size and maturity: something that makes perfect sense to us as big people, but that Jack doubtless perceives as unfair treatment.

I try to put a positive spin on it for Jack and play to his sense of pride and burgeoning maturity by telling him that he’s almost like a second Dad to Christopher (and maybe that’s me drawing upon the only sibling dynamic of which I’ve had direct experience) and should start acting that way. He usually listens to this speech intently, and a few times I’ve felt like he’s been on the cusp of a Eureka moment, but then he’ll march off and slap his little brother across the head, or pull the cat’s tail or something, and I’ll remember that all little kids are essentially psychopaths and give up.

We were very supportive earlier in the year when little Christopher started taking his first uncertain steps as a fully-fledged member of the bipedal club, and for some reason we imagined Jack would be, too. We really are silly idiots. Christopher would run across the no-man’s land of our living room, falling as if shot first into my arms, and then into his mother’s, gaining more time and distance upright with each passing day. Our cheers filled the room like the end of a Rocky Balboa fight. One particular day Jack was observing stoically from the side-lines, when without any warning whatsoever, just at the apex of a particularly loud cheer, he walked up to his teetering brother and – calmly and perfunctorily – pushed him onto his face, whereupon Christopher’s nose exploded like a fist hammering down on a pouch of ketchup.

Both kids can be kind and sweet with other kids, Jack especially. He’s intuitive and responsive, nurturing and commanding. But then he’s not competing for resources and affection with those other kids. A little jealousy and conflict between siblings seems unavoidable, and entirely normal. The drive to compete and conquer would appear to be hardwired into us – especially us knuckle-dragging penis-wearers.

While the brothers get closer and cosier and calmer with each passing day we’ve taken to giving them a little one-on-one time with each of us a couple of times a week. They still spend the majority of their time together, but this helps them to breathe and be their own wee people – as much as they can be their own wee people while still in the orbit of our influence. Giving them one-on-one time helps us as parents, too, because the already high baseline of parental guilt tends to increase exponentially whenever you have to half or otherwise slash the attention you’re able to give one child due to the different, more immediate needs of one of the others.

Still, what Jack doesn’t realise is that every time he lashes out at Christopher or does something naughty or nasty to him just to see what will happen he’s handing his brother the tools and techniques he needs to eventually defeat him; he’s turning his little brother into the starting-field fighter he never was as a toddler, because Jack never had to contend with a Jack. The health visitors also predict that Christopher’s going to be the bigger of the two brothers.

Simply put? One day his little brother’s going to knock him the fuck out.

The signs are already there. A few months ago they were both in the hallway. Jack strolled up to Christopher with a sneer on his face, and shook him violently by the shoulders, for no reason that any rational mind could deduce. Little Christopher’s face morphed from neutral to enraged, Jack entirely oblivious to his little brother’s living mask of anger as he turned around to walk away. Christopher pulled back a full-body-fist, much like the one George McFly pulled in the seconds before hitting Biff Tannen, and released it, sending him spinning through the air at speed towards the back of his big brother’s head. He rotated 360 degrees with his fist held aloft before losing his balance and thudding bumwards to the ground like a man too drunk to fight. His tiny fist had connected with nothing. Jack was already in a different room, wreaking fresh havoc on inanimate objects. I laughed, but also felt suitably impressed by the little guy’s moxy.

Be kind, Jack, because it’s good to be kind. But also be kind because sometimes it’s the smart thing to do.

My partner and I are going to try for a third baby in the not too-distant future. Are we crazy? And what would be the best – or easiest – addition to the mix? A third boy? Or a little girl?

Maybe we’ll just get another cat.

Negan: The Walking Dead’s Saviour? Emmm…

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Negan in the comic books is physically imposing and plausibly psychotic. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a fine actor, but he somehow doesn’t feel like the right man for the role. Negan needed to be part Henry Rollins, part Tony Soprano, and part Wilson Fisk. For his interpretation of Negan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan seems to be channelling Ian McShane’s mid-life crisis. I’m convinced by neither his physicality nor his charm. He spends the bulk of his time on screen slinking about in his ‘geez a gobble’ leather-jacket, cradling a barbed cock-proxy and blathering about pussies. He’s little more than a post-apocalyptic, post-watershed Del Boy; a washed-up Fonzie after a long spell in AA.

TV Negan doesn’t seem especially cunning and, crucially, he doesn’t inspire dread, tension or terror like the Governor or the crazy cannibals before him. When he raises his voice to shout, employing his weirdly over-emphasised, sub-Shatner shtick, it’s not a mercurial, megalomaniacal, homicidal demigod that’s brought to mind, but a hitherto mild-mannered deputy head teacher losing his shit at the school assembly. TV Negan is simply a smug, sleazy, cheeky asshole, who just happens to have insinuated himself into a position of supreme authority while everyone was looking the other way. Not only does he not feel like a real and credible threat, he doesn’t even feel like a real guy; just a composite of hammy panto villains, a wicked step-mother that occasionally gets to stove people’s heads in with a baseball bat.

The Saviours themselves are an odd phenomenon, too. Here’s a band of maniacs hundreds strong, spread out across a wide geographical area, with outposts and spotters and tentacles everywhere, and yet the group from Alexandria never encountered them once. Not until Rick and his crew turned up dragging death and bad-luck behind them like a plough. These days, no-one can sneak out for a piss without a man with an AK47 jumping out from the bushes and demanding half. Negan himself was introduced as a near mythical figure, always spoken of in hushed tones; a living legend that was as elusive as a smile on Michonne’s face; a man who never revealed himself, and kept to the shadows, his people even employing the old ‘I Am Spartacus’ technique to keep his identity hidden from the masses… what happened to all that? Now the gobby fucker pops round for tea about six times a week, usually without back-up. He’s an enigma wrapped in a puzzle wrapped in an illuminous jacket with a GPS tracker in the top pocket. He’ll be doing a fucking book tour next.

I can’t wrap my head around the mechanics of how TV Negan managed to amass such a cowed and loyal, multifarious following of normals and nutcases alike; deeply puzzled as to why he hasn’t been assassinated. He doesn’t seem to have an especially sympathetic or trustworthy high command around him to act as his buffer, and any carroty behaviour he exhibits is rendered pretty much void by his vast preference for the stick. I get that other people’s greed and fear, and the carte blanche he gives them to unleash their ids while in his company keep them enjoying (or submitting to) Negan’s reign of terror, but that again begs the question: why hasn’t one of the innumerable violent psychopaths in his crew assassinated him?

All Negan seems to do is talk. And talk. And talk. And talk. Punctuating every other line with a triple knee-collapse, like he’s just finished a particularly tricky tap dance: ta-da! Or perhaps auditioning for a new, post-apocalyptic boy-band (sometimes I think he’s going to launch into that thing people do where they pretend to be walking down a set of stairs). And talk. And talk. And talk. And talk some more. Man, does that guy talk. Every episode in which he’s yet featured has consisted of five per cent Daryl scowling, five per cent Rick’s cry face, ten per cent Carl’s atrocious attempts at emoting, forty per cent people wandering in the forest, twenty per cent miserable people whispering in dark rooms, twenty per cent cheeky ‘I’m yer pal but I’m no really yer pal’ winsome grins, and six thousand per cent Negan talking.

In the comics, Negan’s talking is a joy to behold, principally because he’s allowed to talk as a real murderous dictator would, and not in a watered-down, neutered way to make his stylings appropriate for American network television. Negan does the ‘poopy pants’ line he utters upon first meeting Rick in the comics, too, but because he also peppers his sentences with a barrage of fucks, the discordance of the ‘poopy pants’ line renders it – and his entire subsequent speech – both scarier and funnier.

Here are some choice excerpts of comic-book Negan getting his swear on:

“So now I’m going to beat the holy fuck fucking fuckedy fuck out of one of you with my bat.”

“And here I am. Friendly as a fuckless fuck on a fuck free day.”

“You think I got all these little communities at my feet because I roam the countryside bashing in Asian-American skulls? That’s no fucking way to make friends. Everyone toes the line because I provide them a service. I keep them safe. We’re the saviours, not the kill your friends so you don’t fucking like us at alls.”

“I assure you, m’am, he’s dead as fuck.”

“So now our big swinging dick is going to swing harder…and faster, until we take off like a motherfucking helicopter and blow all these motherfuckers away.”

Isn’t it odd that the network and its advertisers aren’t too concerned about things like a man being literally torn apart in a set of revolving doors, or rotten corpses chasing after children, but absolutely will not tolerate the use of the word ‘fuck’? That’s the word I use when I stub my toe. I can only imagine what I’d say if a zombie tried to rip my cheek off with its stinking, contaminated teeth. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be ‘Cor blimey, guv’nor, this is a pickle and no mistake.’

I often wish that HBO had picked up ‘The Walking Dead,’ thrown a bigger budget and a more authentic cavalcade of sex, swearing and violence at the screen. More and more, I’m coming to prefer the insane inventiveness and all-round bat-shit craziness of SyFy’s Z Nation, which – while clearly ridiculous – always leaves me with a grin on my face. The arrival of Negan in The Walking Dead comics heralded an upswing in risk, excitement, tension, horror, hope and humour. I can’t say the same for the TV show, which appears to have slipped into a coma in its seventh season, awaiting a final and merciful headshot. Season six wasn’t perfect, but it at least had a smattering of excellent episodes to balance out the dreck and the crass manipulations. Season seven has Negan. That should’ve been enough. Sadly – at this stage at least – it isn’t.

Come on, Negan, Mr Poopy Pants. There’s still time for you to save the show by fulfilling your destiny as Mr Motherfucking Shitty Fuck Pants.

Violence – It’s All in the Game

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I’ve been thinking about that age-old question: do violent video games make us violent, or do we make these violent video games because we’re a violent species? Well, I say it’s an age-old question. It’s a pretty new question, really. My history’s not perfect, but I don’t think they debated it during the Hundred Years War.

‘What chance ‘av we got strategising against ze English when zey play so much facking Spess Invaders?’

To be honest, I think even Pong’s arrival was too soon to be debating the issue:

‘I want this horrid, bad influence of a game banned immediately. My son’s been playing it all week and he’s just nailed himself to a plank of wood with roller skates on it and now he’s sliding up the wall flinging cricket balls at people!’

This is where I’m from. And this is where I’ll always be. I’m trapped in you, 1980s.

I’ve been playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto (GTA) Vice City on the PS2 recently. I know, I know. Viva das zeitgeist. Finger on the pulse and all that. Maybe I’ll watch some Quatermass on Betamax as I’m playing it, while phoning you on a shoe-box-sized mobile phone to tell you all about it.

GTA doesn’t half make me aggressive – which is strange. Third world debt doesn’t make me angry. Starving kids don’t make me angry. Job losses in my home town don’t make me angry. But running out of time on a virtual mission to kill as many prostitutes as possible using only a flame-thrower? FUCK YOU, WORLD. FUCK YOU ALL THE WAY UP YOUR HOT MOLTEN CORE!! Only the accidental snapping off of the pissy little key on a tin of corned beef can even bring me close to such heights of rage.

It’s surely not normal that a game can make me think to myself, calmly and rationally: ‘I’m pretty bloody annoyed I failed that tricky mission. I think I’ll just go butcher some police officers until I calm down a bit.’

Because in the real world my arse jitters like a hedgehog in a cement-mixer when I drive past a cop car, even when I’m obeying the law and have nothing to hide. Cultural conditioning, I suppose. And human decency. And perhaps even a certain pussy-assedness. But in the virtual world, I’m chasing them down the street with machetes and rocket launchers, shouting quotes from Scarface.

This is surely unprecedented in humanity. Never before have tiny little pretend people – non-living avatars composed of motes of electrical magic in a make-believe world – been subjected to such florid and disgusting abuse: ‘GET OUT OF MY WAY OR I’LL KILL YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY YOU FUCKING COMPUTERISED CUNT!’ Shakespeare should watch me play and take notes for his next sonnet.

I’m a reasonably placid person in ‘real life’, so I’ve been wondering why GTA has had this effect on me. I’ve concluded that:

  • I don’t like losing at silly little games because I’m a big fucking baby.
  • I’ve no sense of perspective.
  • Aggressive competition and disgraceful violence is wired into my pathetic, throwback monkey brain.

More musings on this topic in the next few days. 

Sieg Kyle – Daytime TV’s Case for Sterilisation

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I wrote the piece below about four or five years ago. These days, Jeremy Kyle styles himself on a waxwork of a waiter from the Titanic, and has taken his hectoring talk-show to the States, its spiritual home – Jamie

Jeremy Kyle has become what many of his studio guests need: an institution. He is a mainstay of modern British media culture, along with Richard and Judy, Rolf Harris and Howard from the Halifax ads.

His long-running show serves us up a daily dose of poor, stupid and ugly people with which to satisfy our voyeurism, and generally make us feel better about our own pathetic little lives. Jeremy and his production team like to pretend that each edition is a sort-of pseudo trial, designed to expose dishonest behaviour before a furious Jury of the People, an act that will surely take away the need for any real social work, and possibly save the world. It’s all about reclaiming lost dignity, punishing the sinful, mending fences and repairing lives. Is it? Is it really? Then why does it seem that all Jeremy – and, by extension, we the viewers – are interested in is humiliation on a grand scale, with the added bonus of the threat of violence?

The typical guest is from the north of England, or Scotland, possesses little in the way of teeth or intellect, and has usually been – despite resembling a walking tumour – shagging their entire home town. Paternity and lie detector tests are the order of the day. The results of the latter wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law, but anything goes in Jeremy’s daytime Kangaroo Court. That’s why there are so many big, bald men with tattoos on stand-by as security; just in case any of the big, bald men with tattoos featured as guests decide to pop Jeremy’s head off and use it as a football.

The episode I watched featured the usual slideshow of human sputum, tears and tantrums. One of the segments told the beautiful story of an adolescent male who had met and ‘romanced’ a young lady, only to find out after their brief relationship ended that his ex-beau believed herself to be pregnant with his child. He disputed the accuracy of this claim, and thus demanded that she submit to a DNA test. Once his neckless, feckless, and dietarily reckless ex-partner thundered out on to the stage, I too was pretty eager for a DNA test: to prove she was human.

The ex instantly endeared herself to the audience by free-style swearing, and nervously yet aggressively hitting her shoe. I know it’s become something of cliché to describe an inarticulate, chavish girl as being like Vicky Pollard, but this lady really is the closest match I’ve seen; in looks, speech and mental processing abilities. She couldn’t see any connection between her outright refusal to submit to a simple test that would prove she was telling the truth about her pregnancy, and Jeremy Kyle’s mounting disbelief at her story. As guests often do on the Jeremy Kyle Show, she stormed off backstage. He followed her, changing his tone from hectoring, Hellfire Baptist minister to wise, understanding uncle. ‘Never mind them out there, it’s just you and me, now,’ he said to her, or words to that effect, refusing to let the fact that millions of eyes were on them both destroy the sense of intimacy he was cultivating.

‘Why don’t you want to take the test?’ he asked her softly. Her response almost had me rolling on the floor. ‘I’m not going to go down to his level,’ she said, rolling her eyes and continuing to batter her shoe.

Some might say that once you’re sitting on Jeremy’s backstage sofa it’s a little too late to worry about dropping a level or two. This is it, Neckless. This is rock bottom.

Let’s put aside our role as collaborating spectators for a moment (yes, I’m talking to you) and ask ourselves why anyone in their right mind (I think I’ve just answered my own question) would want to appear on Jeremy’s show. I see it as a venal circus, from which few emerge with even a shred of dignity; and that’s true even of the protagonists who initially approach the producers to get their pound of flesh from someone who’s done them wrong. Why don’t the guests see it that way? I can perhaps see why a cuckolded husband would want to see an angry audience screaming at his scrawny, cheating wife; but why would the wife want to subject herself to this treatment, and vice versa where the sexes are reversed?

Who gets a phone call from the Jeremy Kyle Show and thinks, yes, yes, I do want to have a middle-aged man shouting at me in-front of two hundred people, who will also be shouting at me, while the people watching at home hiss ‘scum’ at me.

Well, perhaps you would consider going on the show if you were dirt-poor, trapped in a life you couldn’t escape, ill-educated, desperate and sincerely believed that the Kyle show was an institution primarily concerned with helping people and not with exploiting and humiliating them for advertising revenue. Or if you were getting an all-expenses-paid trip to London, and the chance for your fifteen minutes of fame, however grisly.

Certainly one thing you won’t see on the Jeremy Kyle show is a top-hat-wearing male doctor arguing with his Gucci-clad lawyer of an ex-wife about who’s going to get custody of their Shih Tzu, Phillip. Funny that.

How do the producers sleep at night? I’m sure the Nazi doctors salved their consciences by assuring themselves that their work was for the good of mankind. Maybe that’s what they do.

Our society, and care industry, must be in one Hell of a shape.