Are you a ‘but’ man?

Posted on November 7, 2009 by Joe

I was reminded earlier today, whilst reading a book called ‘Life 101′, of a useful piece of advice from one of the more under-rated personal development gurus of the mid 20th Century – Sergeant Ernest Bilko of the United States Army. Let’s listen to what he has to say on the topic of a three letter word…

You said, “but.” I’ve put my finger on the whole trouble. You’re a “but” man. Don’t say, “but.” That little word “but” is the difference between success and failure. Henry Ford said, “I’m going to invent the automobile,” and Arthur T. Flanken said, “But . . .”

And so it was, according to Bilko, that Ford remains in history whilst Flanken doesn’t even make the footnotes.

‘But’ is indeed one of the words in the English language that fills me with trepidation. During my years in consulting, hearing someone agree with what you were proposing, and then adding the word ‘…but’ (complete with pause) to the end of a sentence was the equivalent of telling me that I was as likely to get cooperation as I was to win the Nobel Prize for Physics and Literature in the same year.

There some occasions when it’s valuable to pull someone up short before they thunder off and implement some plan or other that at best can be described as ‘unwise’. And there are times when the use of but can provide a useful reminder for folks that their master plan requires a few tweaks before it will work properly. But often ‘but’ is used as a prelude to a road-block.

Rather than ‘but’ I now try and use ‘and’ or ‘or’ instead of ‘but’ – then rephrase the part of teh sentence after the old ‘but’ to look towards solutions. For example:

I’d like to buy a new computer, but it costs too much.

becomes

I’d like to buy a new computer, and in order to give me time to save the extra money, I’ll put the purchase off for a month and see if I can do some overtime in the meantime to help raise the extra cash.

The first sentence becomes, in the but-less second sentence, an intention with a timescale and a partial solution to the problem of money. As the guys at Honda say, ‘and’ is a great little word – it opens up opportunities for solutions, rather than closing things down.

Don’t be a but-nik!

All hail the scapegoats!

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Joe

In ancient Jewish society, the scapegoat was a normal goat that was ceremonially loaded with all the sins of the community, and then driven from town in to the wilderness, as part of the ceremonies around the Day or Atonement. The goat would almost certainly die in the desert, and with it would die the sins of the community. The term has passed in to general usage, as we all know, to refer to someone who gets to carry the can when the crap hits the fan.

Earlier today I blogged on the topic of Philip Laing, the student in trouble here in Sheffield, and was reminded of a comment made by my better half about whether the venom being expended towards this fellow was actually a form of scapegoating. We’ve had over two years of miscellaneous nonsense here in the UK – the banking crisis, MP’s expenses, the Recession, the War in Afghanistan and Iraq – the list goes on. Then conveniently along comes someone who we can all have a go at, who isn’t rich and powerful and who’s actually done something that is pretty damn stupid and manages to annoy vast numbers of people.

In fact, the perfect scapegoat!

Here’s a quick guide for you to help you play ‘Spot the Scapegoat’ – a useful parlour game for this winter preceding a general election when we can expect the Government and Media to try and blame anyone and everyone – except the genuine culprits – for the wrongs of the world.

Plausibility

A scapegoat must be plausible. there’s little point in picking on someone totally innocuous. You need someone or a group of people who’ve been bad, been caught out, and for whose behaviour there can be little excuse. Little old ladies caught exceeding the speed limit by 5 miles per hour don’t really meet the requirement.

Powerless

An ideal scapegoat would be suitably powerless. After all, we don’t want them coming back at us, do we? Really powerful people will rarely become scapegoats unless they’ve upset some even more powerful people. The media don’t want to upset someone with muscle who could make the media look like horse’s bottoms.

Scalability

Having found a plausible, powerless person to act as scapegoat, their bad behaviour has to be ‘scalable’. Scalability is a technical term for the ability of a system to cope with heavier loads than expected without needing a lot of work. So, if we want a good scapegoat on which we can unload a pile of public anger, the scapegoat’s behaviour must be something that can be ‘worked up’ in some way. So, Mr Laing’s offence can easily be used to indicate that it’s the start of the end of Western Civilisation as we know it as respect for all that is good in society declines, etc.

Publicity

If you want a good scapegoat, they have to be public figures or elevated in to the rank of public notoriety by the media or the Internet. If you can get a good gossipy campaign going, apparently driven by the general public, you’re in clover.

No apologies

Your perfect scapegoat should ideally be photographed with a black cloak and a Victorian moustache, eating babies and shouting that they are sorry for nothing. If this ideal scenario can’t be achieved, then a lack of apology will do. If the scapegoat attempts a half-arsed apology, all the better. But if they go for the genuine apology, their value as a scapegoat is diminished.

Have something ready to sneak out

Apart from deflecting blame from the real culprits, the exposure and persecution of a good scapegoat can offer the Government and other people of power and influence the opportunity to sweep other things under the carpet. If you have a scapegoat, never waste the opportunity to get a few bad-news stories out at the same time.

Get a life!

Posted on October 31, 2009 by Joe

Being a discussion on the Etiquette of the Insult for the 21st century…

duellists I was recently fortunate enough to have this old chestnut of an insult thrown at me online in a discussion about some news item. It’s a strange thing to say to anyone; the fact that I’m typing indicates I do indeed have a life, and to be honest I think with my achievements I’ve managed to fit 2 and a half lives or so in to things so far.

The intention of this piece is not to name and shame, however tempting that is…it just set me thinking about insults and abuse in general. I think in recent years the unpleasant behaviour of insulting folks – especially online or via text – has become much more frequent. I think a lot of it is that it’s easier to be abusive anonymously, and the extra mileage placed between insulter and insultee does make a smack in the mouth or a slap across the face harder to deliver back to the insulter. So, here we go. A 21st Century Guide to insulting Etiquette.

Of course, gentlemen and ladies do not insult each other…as I know very few of either (and doubt I am a gentleman myself) this is hopefully useful stuff for the rest of us!

Consequences

When I was a kid, you tended to bite your tongue before insulting someone because there was a serious risk of being thumped. In previous centuries you would have had a serious risk of being shot in a pistol duel or scarred or killed in a sword duel. If you ‘knew the right people’ you could have your insulter beaten up. Now that you can insult anonymously and from outside arm’s reach, it has made people more willing to insult people than ever before, and for less good reasons. Which moves us on to point number 2 – have good reason to insult.

Insult escalation

George Orwell once commented to the effect that if you reviewed a book and found it ‘outstanding’, and then three weeks later found an even better book, then you couldn’t really write ‘even more outstanding than the last outstanding book’. I guess these days it’s ‘ratings inflation’. But in days when there were potentially serious consequences for insulting people, all involved were careful about the insults thrown and the reaction taken. I might easily let a mild insult go by if the consequence to my following it up were to be a duel. I would think twice before slapping someone across the face after he’d called me a moron for wearing black shoes when we all know that brown was the de riguer colour of teh day. Today, there are fewer consequences and it’s easier to get in to a verbal pissing match. So, if you feel teh need to insult, be proportionate – don’t go over the top and push the other person in to a corner from which they may lash out. And, if you’ve been insulted, think hard and long before escalating.

It was only a joke…

Oh dear – the well worn phrase of the coward, the moron or the child. If you insult someone, have the guts to stand there when you’re called on it and either repeat your insult or wholeheartedly apologise for your behaviour. Bleating that ‘it was only a joke’ is the defence of three groups of people:

The child – it works to some degree in the playground but once you’re over 12 years old you should start leaving this phrase behind. It’s continued use indicates you may have the mental age of an infant, and should therefore not be out and about with the grownups.
The moron – the sort of slack-jawed suburban yokel who believes the Jeremy Kyle programme to be current affairs and Wayne and Waynetta Slob to be fine role models can hardly be expected to know better.
The coward – falling back on this defence when one doesn’t fall in to category (1) or (2) above indicates cowardice.

Falling back on this phrase after being called on your insults thus catapults you in to one of three groups of society unfitting for a mature adult. So don’t do it.

I was drunk / stoned

Some hold this to be a mitigating circumstance, others regard it as making matters worse – as well as you being insulting it indicates you can’t hold your drink / drugs. Again – don’t fall back on this – either repeat your insult or wholeheartedly apologise. This is a weasel response.

Water off a duck’s back

Very few insults are worth getting your blood pressure elevated over. Even fewer are worth engaging in wit and repartee with the insulter. Remember that by the very fact they’ve insulted you, they’re not ladies or gentlemen. Therefore they’re unworthy and engaging with them, even to the level of ‘And your mother wears army boots’, simply brings you down to their level. Sometimes the best response is to behave as if you hadn’t noticed it. Online this can be most satisfying, as the truly dim insulter will carry on making louder and more ridiculous comments until they prove to the rest of the world what you already know…

So, ignore where possible!

Graceful Acceptance

Sometimes the recipient of an insult can carry out the graceful acceptance manoeuvre in which there is an apparent agreement with teh sentiments of the insult. This isn’t always applicable but when it is it can totally disarm the insulter.

Full and wholehearted apology

The original insult may have been triggered by what you consider to be a genuine wrong, and in that case you still need to deal with the original problem. But if you do find yourself in a position where apology seems to be the most sensible, adult and mature way forward, then apologise for the insult fully, whole-heartedly and publicly. A non-public apology after you’ve denigrated someone in public is, to be honest, a little weaselly.

With luck, the person you insulted will be gracious enough to accept your apology and walk away from the whole palaver. At which point you’ll probably both be wondering how the Devil you got in to the mess in the first place….

BNP support increase – why the surprise?

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Joe

For anyone who’s been asleep or under a particularly soundproofed rock for the last few weeks, here’s a quick ‘catch up’. Nick Griffin, leader of the UK’s Far Right British National Party, was invited on to BBC Television’s flagship political debate programme, ‘Question Time’. This generated a great deal of fuss and bother. Anti-Fascist groups demonstrated, Griffin himself objected about the format of the show, and it was one of the least edifying sights I’ve seen on TV for some years. A survey today reveals that after Griffin’s appearance on the show, support for the party has increased. Peter Hain is saying that this was exactly the sort of thing that led to Nazi Germany…sorry…that was Basil Fawlty…Peter Hain is saying that this was exactly the sort of thing he was afraid of. And even insiders at the BBC are stating that the way the program was handled was a farce and that Griffin was subjected to ‘attack dogs’.

Woooo…..serious stuff. Let’s just stop for a moment shall we? First of all, let’s make it clear to all and sundry that I’m no BNP supporter or fellow traveller. I say that now because I know from experience on certain Internet Forums any attempt to look at the phenomena that is the BNP or any aspect of multicultural politics in Britain tends to result in you being called a Nazi, racist, sympathiser, etc. So let’s nail that one first and now discuss the issue like grown-ups.

In terms of voting intention for an election tomorrow, the proportion who said they’d vote BNP was 3%. Last month, it was 2%. So, oodles of free publicity, massive TV coverage, the sort of profile that Griffin might have only gotten by leading a Wetherspoons Putsch and all that happens is an extra 1% of firm vote support. Pardon me, Peter, if I don’t get too panicky just yet? Yes, 22% of voters suggested that they might seriously consider voting BNP, but there’s many a slip between poll and ballot box.

What was obvious from the furore surrounding this edition of ‘Question Time’ is that :

A large number of protesters attempted to prevent the leader of a legal UK political party – how represehensible we might find the opinions of that party is irrelevant – from taking part in a debate on UK television.
Various high ranking political figures appeared to apply pressure to the BBC to not allow the broadcast to take place.
The format of the broadcast DID appear to be different to usual – it had all the hallmarks of a bear baiting session and I venture to suggest that the chairing of the programme could have been better.

The overall result of this has been to allow Griffin to be able to call ‘foul’ and play the ‘Martyr’ card – that well beloved ploy of all political extremists who know that their chances at the ballot box are pretty slim in any other circumstances. Griffin performed incredibly poorly on QT – despite the possibly loaded deck, which to be honest he and his advisers might have expected – his answers were not brilliant and he made teh error of getting a few cheap shots in at his political opponents. But, the overall impression that his supporters will take away and propagate through their publicity machine is that ‘We were censored and muzzled by the political establishment, the BBC and the far left’ – the very last impression that this appearance SHOULD have been allowed to give. The UAF, Government and BBC have managed by their total cack-handed handling of this issue to give the BNP the origin of their very own ‘stab in the back’ myth.

The ‘No Platform’ issue is a well worn one. Basically, it’s a policy by the left to attempt to remove any possible platform for Far Right parties in the media – or on Internet Forums, discussion groups, public venues, etc. Short for ‘No platform for Fascists’ it is supposed to starve the Far Right of the ability to publicise themselves and gain recruits. There’s one problem with this approach – it doesn’t work. It simply allows the sort of nonsense we’ve encountered over the last week to play out, gaining the Far Right more recruits and support than if they’d been allowed to quietly get on with making total arses of themselves in public.

To me, ‘No platform’ is simply a censorship operation by the Left, in the style that Stalin and Mao would recognise. Totalitarianism is alive and well on both sides of the political fence. But it is counter productive and dangerous in a wider sense than that of stifling political debate. By permitting teh right to say that they are being censored, their words are heard by more and more people. The British people are not getting more racist; but many are now perceiving that the country is changing it’s cultural make up in a way that doesn’t benefit them:

The Government and main political parties are thought by many people – particularly working class and those in the poorer economic groups – to be totally out of touch with people’s fears and concerns about immigration. Until very recently it’s been difficult to discuss these issues without being howled down in ‘Islington Circles’ as a racist monster who eats babies for breakfast and kicks small dogs.
People have seen the economy got to hell in a basket, and in many cases are now experiencing real pain. They also start noticing immigration – note I said NOTICING – for the first time. Even with no proven factual, causal link between their decrease in standard in living and the number of immigrants that they feel are coming in to the country, they irrationally believe and fear that there IS a causal link.
When the Government produces statistics that disprove any link between immigration and economic well being, or even suggest that there is a positive link, people are not believing it. This is partially because there are often other reports and statistics that prove the other point of view. Debating the issue then turns in to a game of ‘URL Tennis’ as participants fling references around like intellectual hand-grenades, attempting to trip up the logic or mathematics in the report and, if that fails, the credentials of the authors.
The Government is seen as being a bunch of lying bastards. The Government have been seen to lie on numerous issues – the 2003 Iraq War being a biggie, for example. If they’ll lie to take us to war, folks quite rightly believe they’ll lie on other policies. And as if by magic…in today’s Daily Mail there is a story of how Jack Straw and Tony Blair planned to pull an immigration ‘fast one’ on the people of Britain.
People wonder why the main parties are unwilling to discuss immigration and multiculturalism. People perceive an ‘elephant in the living room’ event taking place. The lack of debate or willingness to debate makes people fear the worst.
Media stories and programs bolster peopel’s fear of immigration and multiculturalism, especially in the absence of open, factual debate. For example, we get the ongoing ‘No Christmas Decorations’ sort of bollocks every year, programs like UK Border Patrol that show the efforts of the UK’s Border Agencies to keep undesirables out, etc.

In other words, there is an overwhelming perception for many people that this country is changing – no, is BEING changed by the Government – to a multicultural wonderland in which the views of the indiginous majority are being ignored. And the only people who’re paying attention to this is the BNP. And when these folks feel and fear that the BNP is being censored – and the BNP themselves can point to violent demonstrations to attempt to stop their leader speaking on TV – then people may well start thinking ‘What are these bastards trying to hide from me?‘

So, what’s to be done?

First of all, there needs to be an open discussion on all aspects of immigration and multicularal policies in the UK. It needs to be wideranging and it will involve engaging with very unplesant people on all sides of the argument. there can be no ‘No Platform’ nonsesne.
It must be possible for people to think and say the currently unthinkable in discourse without being howled down. You don’t destroy ideas by stopping them being expressed. You destroy them by exposing them to teh light of reasoned and factual analysis.
Government, opposition and opinion formers MUST realise that they are first of all dealing with perception and belief – in other words, irrational feelings that must be addressed before people can engage in this sort of debate. This will not be easy but is essential. The first stage is to simply say to people ‘We appreciate you’re a bit worried; we’re hear to listen. And then feckin’ LISTEN and don’t hear just what you want to hear.

Put bluntly, we have a fine campaigining season ahead for the bigots, the true racists, the thugs and the idealogues of both political extremes; economic recession, out of touch and dishonest Government, a few instances of corrupt and dishonest politicians stealing public money in their expenses, bankers bonuses getting stupidly high again, increasing unemployment, unpopular wars.

It’s time for Government and the political and media establishments of the UK to do soemthing before it all goes pear shaped. Censoring and demonstrating is not enough – it’s time to engage and defeat the ideas of extremists of both political colours.

Thanks for reading – go forth and get defeating.

Dubbed Hitler – why is it funny?

Posted on October 24, 2009 by Joe

After the last post on here, ‘Gazing in to the abyss’, I concluded that I needed to take off the Old Testament ‘Prophet of Doom’ robes for a little while and take a slightly lighter view of something. Which is why, at first glance, the title of this piece may raise the odd eyebrow.

Some months ago, a clip from the film ‘Downfall’ appeared online. The film is about the final days in the Berlin Bunker at the end of World War 2. The scene features Hitler and his Generals studing a map, discussing a counter-attack that will never come. Hitler goes off on a serious rant at his military commanders, eventually settling down in to an admission that it’s all over.

So far, no great bundle of screaming laughs. But the 4 minute piece of video was then dubbed with whole new story lines – ‘Hitler discovers Michael Jackson is dead’, for example (left) is one of the funnier mashups on this theme on the Web.There are lots of others – Hitler finds out Oasis have split, that he’s been thrown off Xbox Live, that twitter is down again, that Liverpool have lost a soccer match. The list goes on. There’s even one where Hitler rants abouyt being subtitled…

The quality varies – some are just plain nasty, others mildly amusing, some I find laugh out loud funny.What this says about my sense of humour and the sense of humour of the people who put the mashups together is what I want to look at in this post.I guess now would be a good time to put in the usual justification that seems to be required these days….no, I don’t find Hitler amusing per se. No, I’m not a Nazi sympathiser, Yes, I do appreciate that World War 2 was not funny.

On a more practical basis, if you have even ‘schoolboy German’ the whole illusion is destroyed, so winding the sound down is quite helpful!

And having got that out of the way…

I guess we’ve always used humour to poke fun at evil. In the 1930s George Orwell (I believe) commented that the goose-step was a ludicrous way to walk, but as the marchers had guns it was best not to laugh too loudly.

Even during the Second World War, various rude comic songs were sung by the allied soldiers remarking on the rumour about Hitler’s single testicle – although the sentiment was expressed in less polite words – and various satires and comedies emerged from the War taking the mickey from the so-called Master Race – To Be or Not To Be and ‘The Great Dictator’ being the two most famous. However, it’s worth remembering that both of these films were made before the sheer scale and nature of the atrocities committed by the Nazis became known; after news came out about the Concentration Camps and the extermination policies of the Nazis, it took until Mel Brooks’s ‘The Producers’ in 1968 before it became possible to laugh at the Nazis again.

It’s worth noting that this sort of humour always picks fun at the Nazis, never their actions. There are invariably some very dark and usually unfunny attempts at humour that pick up on the cruelty of the Nazis, and occasionally even the death camps, but they’re uncommon.

The Downfall Mashups all have one thing in common; they feature Hitler ranting and raving on the behalf of the mashup creator about something that matters to them. Hitler’s been subverted to any number of things that cause people to ‘lose it’. Maybe he provides us with that excuse we need to really lose our rag to the degree of what might be called a ‘towering fury’. I had one of those years ago – it was kicked off by soemthing really stupid and I went ballistic. About 30 seconds in I KNEW I was in the wrong but what the heck, I was enjoying it so much that I genuinely didn’t want to stop – I knew I was going to have problems looking my colleagues in the eye for days afterwards, but it just felt so worth it. I literally did feel that I was towering above the situation!

Maybe the Downfall Mashup allows us to project our feelings on to a character well known for his rants – a sort of scapegoat for acting out in public. We can script our ‘actor’, wind him up and let him go. We vent our spleen, and as a side benefit reduce one of history’s most evil men to the part of an actor in one of our own rants against society. I wonder how long it will be before there’s a ‘personally abusive’ version where someone takes it out on a real, named individual that they dislike?

Is there a down side to the Downfall Mashup phenomenenon? I’m not sure – there’s one school of thought that says that this actually humanises Hitler and gives young people today a view of the Fuhrer as a comic spectacle, a foil for our own humour. This might be so, but the solution there is to ensure that we don’t forget the original evil committed by a bunch of very ordinary men with glasses, bad haircuts and bad breath who were allowed to get to where they did in life because no one stopped them.

Or, just maybe, no one laughed at them long and hard and sent them off with their tails between their legs before they got the illusion that they were something special. Who knows.

Gazing in to the abyss

Posted on October 23, 2009 by Joe

Looking-Into-The-Crater Yesterday’s exploration of ’What would George say?’ led me to following up a few points of research and whilst browsing around I came across this quote of Orwell’s:

Here is a saying of Nietzche which I have quoted before, but which is worth quoting again:

He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself;
and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.

’Too long’, in this context, should perhaps be taken as meaning ‘after the dragon is beaten’.

The line that struck a chord with me here, and has done for some years now, is ‘the abyss will gaze in to you’. My topic for today – have we all spent rather too long staring in to the abyss and what have we bought back with us from there?

I guess a good place to start is with exactly what I mean by ‘the abyss’. For me it’s that spiritual dark place where your personal and our cultural demons lie. The trick is that whilst we need to be aware of the fact it’s there, we shouldn’t get ourselves too engrossed in it’s finer geography. I look at it in the way that CS Lewis spoke of the Devil in ‘The Screwtape Letters’:

‘There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors.’

Over the years I’ve wandered to the edge of my personal abyss a few times and stepped back. We all have our personal demons – what matters is whether we give them the freedom to do anything. Show me somone who claims to have no personal demons and I’ll show you a liar. And then there are those people whose demons are, shall we say, rather more unpleasant than those that most of us have; the criminal, the depraved, the insane. The problem that we have today, I believe, is twofold – the abyss is now much wider and deeper than it was even 20 years ago, and it impinges more than ever in to our daily lives.

In 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood asked the question “Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods?’ Back then I think the answer was still ‘yes’, but we didn’t really know what was around the corner. Twenty-five years down the line the abyss comes in to our house courtesy of the Internet. Without sounding too much like Mary Whitehouse on a Sunday Evening, the Internet, cinema and TV have increasingly bought the baser instincts of human beings to the forefront of our consideration. I’m not dumb enough to believe that, in the words of Philip Larkin ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me)‘. Interest in the more extreme edges of pornography – whether that pornography is the pornography of sex or that of violence – has always been with us and was usually squirrelled away in the far recesses of most people’s minds for a number of reasons:

Society was more ‘up tight’ – certain forms of behaviour or artistic expression were simply regarded as wrong and tended to be either illegalor seriously frowned upon by society. Sometimes this was right (IMO) and othertimes it was ridiculous. But there were boundaries set.

There seemed to be less moral relativism – there seemed to be much more of a concensus view in society as to what was ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
Extremely violent pornography of graphical violence was difficult to get hold of.
Anyone who DID have extreme interests was typically on their own; they were in no position to talk about it with friends who might be horrified at their interest.

In these circusmtances, if you went to your abyss, and peered in, and did dwell there a while the risk was pretty minimal for society as a whole. Your trip was a private one, one not to be shared with anyone. And for most of us there was the knowldge that certain things were, to put it bluntly, totally wrong.

The Internet has brought a lot of good in to people’s lives, but it has also amplified the potential for people to gaze deeper and for longer in to the abyss. It’s had two main impacts:

Extreme sexual and violent imagery is available to everyone more easily than ever before in history.
The sheer scope of the Internet means that it’s inevitable that no matter how extreme a person’s ‘interests’ are, it’s almost inevitable that somewhere in the 1.7 billion Internet users there is someone else with the same interests, and a web site delivering up media to accomodate those interests.

The impact of these two facts is that people with particularly unpleasant demons in their abyss now find, to their mind, their beliefs and views validated by the existence of those websites and users. This permits these individuals to look in to their personal abyss and see nothing wrong with what they see there, and hence feel encouragement to express their views in to the world. It’s not trendy to be in favour of censorship, but the validation of perversity that seems to be increasingly common surely cannot be healthy for society as a whole.

The phrase ‘People of the Abyss’ was used by Jack London as the title of a book he wrote in the early 1900s about the poverty of the East End of London; I believe wholeheartedly that we’re now generating a new breed of people of the abyss – those who’ve started hard and long in to the depths of their abyss, and have bought back their personal demons with them in to the workaday-world. This new breed of Abyss Dwellers are to be feared and shunned; their moral compass seems to be dictated by ‘it works for me and is no one else’s business what I do’ and they exhibit a lack of respect for the social codes of the society in which they live.

It’s not just extreme sex and violence that is an issue; I’ve just spent some time watching scenes of anti-fascist demonstrators protesting outside the BBC about the appearance of Nick Griffin of the BNP on BBC’s Question Time. There is soemthing ironic about a group allegedly demonstrating to preserve democracy by attempting to censor a TV programme. Perhaps these anti-fascists who’ve ‘fought the dragon’ are in danger of becoming that which they fight? In George Steiner’s novella ‘The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.’ – written in 1981 – a trial in teh South American jungle allows the 90 year old Hitler, who in this novella survived the fall of Berlin, to explain himself. One comment made is that those who fought agaisnt him have taken on board many of the characteristics of his regime – in other words, by peering in to teh Nazi abyss and fighting the dragon, they’ve fought for too long and brought parts of the abyss back with them, and have now become the dragon which they once fought. Defending democracy is a delicate balancing act; you should not get so involved in the way of the enemy that you forget that you fight against that you forget the positive characteristics of what you’re fighting for.

In his novella, Steiner has a character say:

“There shall come a man who [...] will know the grammar of hell and teach it to others. He will know the sounds of madness and loathing and make them seem music.”

He was, obviously, referring to Hitler in the book but today there are many such people in the public eye and those who we personally may be aware of who might be described in the same way. Modern people of the abyss who’ve been there and returned with a little more than they bargained for, and who’re determined to further expand their view of the world, and widen the abyss further, expanding the geography of Hell further in to our daily lives.

I’m a Christian – I think that colours my opinions on a number of topics, and makes me address them from a particular moral and ethical standpoint. Whether you have an religious beliefs or not I’d simply suggest that you at least become aware of the place of the abyss in your own life; what you choose to do with it when you find it’s location is up to you. Just remember that having gazed a little too long and deep, you may find that even if you leave the abyss, it may not entirely leave you.

Garden Party…

Posted on October 20, 2009 by Joe

I’ve always been one of the world’s great hoarders…one of those folks who hangs on to things because they may one day be useful, one who starts something and then has to sweat cobs to get it finished.

I guess it’s when I noticed I had 3 pages of accounts, user names and passwords that I thought I might have some issues of spreading msyelf a little thin around the online world! A few more minutes of checking some of the accounts out – and finding that I’d last used them constructively maybe 3 or 4 years ago – made me realise that dragging behind you a load of digital deadwood is similar to having an attic, cellar, garage or study full of physical junk. And the nature of the online world is that it’s really difficult to get back to where you left off – even if the site’s still up and running.

We’ve recently been spending a lot of time tidying up around the Towers here – sorting out books, clearing out old stuff, and it struck me over the weekend that maybe I need to get some online tidiness and focus as well. And the relevance of the blog item title? I’ll get there eventually….

So…what to keep, what to throw, or is it what parts of me to keep, what parts of me to throw away? Ironically, especially considering my previous posts on the subject, top of the keep list are Facebook and Twitter, followed by this August publication that you’re reading right now. My plan is to:

Suspend my accounts on various discussion forums, and focus on stroking my ego through my Twitter and Facebook accounts and this blog. Seriously – I think I am spread waaaay too thin out in cyberspace and really want to be in a position to publish some ‘words with weight’ when I want to.
Close the shutters on a few hobby sites I’ve run for a few years. They’ve never attracted much traffic and I’d rather take them ‘off the grid’ rather than leave them looking forlorn. Good backups will ensure nothing is lost, and who knows, one day they may return – alternatively they may simply be allowed to disappear forever. My last shot at an Online Community - Coffeehouse Chat - is already mothballed. Shame on you who offered support and never came…
There should also be a commensurate loss of email accounts. I don’t know abouyt you but I find that whenever a new web site gets set up you almost always set a new email address up to go with it….
Kill off the accounts on any number of sites that I’ve tried before buying and found wanting – The well, LastFM, Ecademy, etc. Probably even Linked In and other business networking sites. I don’t believe that my brand is, as yet, ‘hot’ enough to warrant being on these sites. I get buried under all the other software developers, wannabe entrepreneurs, etc.

I suppose my bottom line realisation in the last 12 months is that a lot of my current online (and offline) world is of greater relevance to the Joe Pritchard of 5 or 6 years ago than the Joe Pritchard I live with today. It can’t possibly be healthy to live in the past – there’s not going to be room or even inclination to move forward to fresh fields and pastures new if your world is already full. Various things have conspired to chop off quite important anchors to my past, and I’ve become increasingly aware that people have impressions of me that are no longer true, but are like looking at some image of me in some sort of Dorian Gray style painting of how I was some years back. Hopefully, by clearing out the crud I’ll give my self space to move on to new things, whilst still keeping in touch with the people who really matter to me in the here and now.

And the title of this piece? Rick Nelson bought it all home to me in these lyrics:

I went to a garden party to reminisce with my old friends
A chance to share old memories and play our songs again
When I got to the garden party they all knew my name
But no one recognized me I didn’t look the same

But it’s all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see you can’t please ev’ryone so
You got to please yourself

Smart bloke. Time to re-invent.

Book Review – ‘Mere Christianity’

Posted on October 17, 2009 by Joe

Mere Christianity cover from Wikipaedia

When I used to commute between work and office I used to do a regular(ish) item on here called ‘The Bus Book’ in which I reveiwed the book I’d been reading whilst on the commute. One book I intended to review as part of that series, but never managed it because the commuting finished, was C. S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’.

C. S. Lewis is probably best known for his children’s classic ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’, part of the ‘Narnia’ series of stories about a fantastic land in which magic has true power. The books are also deep Christian allegory, reflecting Lewis’s great abilities as a writer on the topic of Christianity and Christian apologetics.

‘Mere Christianity’ grew out of a series of radio lectures that Lewis was asked to do in the Second World War. The BBC approached a large number of writers and artists to develop radio programmes in the war – Orwell and Priestley were amongst Lewis’s fellow contributors to the literary war effort – and Lewis contributed a series of programmes describing the ‘guts’ of Christianity – the common issues that the Christian Faith of all denominations has to deal with. And these programmes, after the war, became the basis of ‘Mere Christianity’.

I’ve often commented that the mental processes that led to my eventual Confirmation in to the Church of England were started by two men – Johnny Cash and C.S. Lewis – both of whom came to their belief via what’s best described as a ‘non-standard’ route – Cash through feeling the presence of God when he’d decided to give up and die in a cave, and Lewis coming back to belief after many years as an Atheist.

‘Mere Christianity’ is a relatively slim book, but heavily laden with ideas. Stylistically it hasn’t aged well in the 60 years since the material was originally written, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The style is best described as ‘no-nonsense’ and the book approaches Christianity from, in my opinion, a very Anglican perspective, although the theses within are applicable to all Christian denominations. The Anglican faith is often said to be based on three cornerstones – Faith, Tradition and Reason – and it is this statement that Lewis uses as the basis of his ideas in the book.

The book is split in to 4 sections -

Right and Wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe
What Christians believe
Christian behaviour
First steps in the doctrine of the Trinity

Central to the arguments of the first part of the book, where Lewis puts the case for Christianity, is the idea that there exists a general ‘law of morality’ – a rule about right and wrong known almost implicitly by all humans. Whatever our beliefs, most people would argue that the Holocaust was wrong at any number of levels, that child-murder is abhorrent, etc. (This was written 60 years ago – I guess it says a lot about the changes in morality in the last 60 years that I had to think hard when writing that last sentence!) Lewis argues that for such a universal rule of right and wrong to be known to people irrespective of culture, there must be something above and beyond us to impose such a rule.

Lewis then posits what is now known in theological circles as the ‘Lewis Trilemma’ - an argument that is now a little dented by modern theological studies but that stated that Jesus was either divine, lying, or insane. As His behaviour didn’t seem to indicate insanity, and his works did not indicate the moral turpitude associated with lying, Lewis was left with the conclusion that Christ was indeed divine.

He explores the virtues and the sins – I have to say that on reading this book for the first time the idea of ’pride’ being a sin – maybe THE sin -came as something of a shock to the system but when Lewis explores the idea that extreme pride is often at the back of the other sins, such as gluttony and lust – then perhaps it’s not such a long shot. He then points out that Pride was what separated the Devil from God in the first place, so that rather put the hat on it!

Lewis’s exploration of virtue, sin and morality from a Christian perspective are interesting and well grounded. He states very clearly that his intention with the book is to bring people who might be intrested in becoming Christians in to a sort of spiritual ‘waiting room’ where they can determine which particular branch of Christianity their calling will be for. And it works very well on that level. he does not intend the book and the ideas within it to be a doctrine of their own.

I think the only issue I woudl take with the book is the language and general style – it’s a little ‘stuffy’ and in a couple of places distinctly politically incorrect - and whilst that doesn’t bother me one jot I can see some people being put off. My advice would be to persevere – the book was written 60 years ago by an upper-middle class male academic, but the issues it deals with are eternal.

I agree wholeheartedly with Anthony Burgess’s comment about the book : “…the idea persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who woudl like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way.” It’s a great and useful book – I wish I’d come across it earlier in my personal spiritual journey. An excellent companion for Lewis’s religious novel in ‘letter’ form, ‘The Screwtape Letters’.

Death of a celebrity

Posted on October 13, 2009 by Joe

This weekend the singer Stephen Gately died at his residence in Majorca. At the time of writing, the cause of death is unknown but suicide, foul play and drugs abuse are not being suggested. I was provoked in to making this post by the reaction to the death that I noticed from various friends and acquaintances who took teh death quite hard but who also commented on the ‘gallows humour’ and apparent indifference of people to the fellow’s passing.

Mr Gately was clearly well loved by friends, family and fans. I have to say that he meant little to me – a passing aquaintance with his name on the news – but unfortunately those who live as celebs must die as celebs, and part of that is the sick jokes marking their passing. Since the widespread uptake of email, and especially since the web, this sort of humour has followed celebrity death as quickly and inexorably as paparazzi photographers and ambulance chasing lawyers. Before electronic media, one at least had to wait for the jokes to appear in the newspapers / magazines or be passed from people who’d heard them from a friend who in turn heard them from a guy who knew the gardener of the dead celeb.

It’s rarely anything personal – it’s a coping mechanism, perhaps some of the milder jokes even provide the 21st Century version of marking the death of someone by printing the borders of the newspapers in black. As some of you will know I was Admin on Sheffield Forum for a couple of years. How to handle posted ‘dead person humour’ was an ongoing problem. I used to apply the rule of 24 – within the first 24 hours it’s not nice – after that, it happens. It may not be nice but it’s a byproduct of being in the celebrity food chain. When you stop swimming in the media seas, your body sinks and the local bottom dwellers come and dismember the body, so to say….

One comment made stuck with me; imagine going to bed at 33 years old and not waking up. When I was a kid I lost a friend who died at age 11. As a younger man I lost a friend who died at 21. Every morning in the developing world people in their 30s don’t wake up because they’ve died in the night of malnutrition, AIDS, Malaria, Cholera. At the risk of sounding callous, I’m afraid that death is not the preserve of the poor, the sick, the elderley and the nobodies in the world. It’s pretty Catholic in it’s tastes and can strike out at anyone – not just people who immediately surround us, and those of our modern pantheon of celebrities that our media choose to inform us are worthy of dying publically. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not hypocritical enough to comment that I feel the death of total strangers in the developing world at all in my life – I don’t – but neither am I willing to go to serious grief over a celebrity who I didn’t know from Adam and who doesn’t even know I personally exist, except as part of a demographic.

I’m willing to admit to being sad at the deaths of three celebs in particular – John Peel, Joe Strummer and Johnny Cash. I grew up with their music playing an important part of my life to varying degrees, so can empathise with people who’ve felt the loss of Mr Gatley as a figure in their musical upbringing – and especially those who’ve actually met the fellow. Whilst we can all reflect on John Donne’s words about ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you’ it’s worth also reflecting on whether your feelings are genuinely inspired by the death, or inspired by the media scrum surrounding the death suggesting how we should feel.

Everybody Hurts

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Joe

For various reasons, I started really thinking about the REM song ‘Everybody Hurts’ today. Just in case you’re not au fait with it – here are the lyrics…

When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone,
When you’re sure you’ve had enough of this life, well hang on
Don’t let yourself go, ’cause everybody cries and everybody hurts sometimes

Sometimes everything is wrong. Now it’s time to sing along
When your day is night alone, (hold on, hold on)
If you feel like letting go, (hold on)
When you think you’ve had too much of this life, well hang on

‘Cause everybody hurts. Take comfort in your friends
Everybody hurts. Don’t throw your hand. Oh, no. Don’t throw your hand
If you feel like you’re alone, no, no, no, you are not alone

If you’re on your own in this life, the days and nights are long,
When you think you’ve had too much of this life to hang on

Well, everybody hurts sometimes,
Everybody cries. And everybody hurts sometimes
And everybody hurts sometimes. So, hold on, hold on
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Everybody hurts. You are not alone
“Everybody hurts. You are not alone.” So very true, and also so difficult to remember when you are in any sort of pain.

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