The Whitewater Tyranny: Twitter and the neoliberal workplace

 So. I've been off Twitter now for a month. The longest period in my life of me not using that site since I got my first smartphone in 2009 and started an incredible thirteen year run of chatting absolute shite online. An astonishing achievement, even if I was forced to do it as a result of being banned for being beastly about that nice Mr Putin. So a month later, what are my thoughts?

Tippi Hedren becomes the Main Character

One of the things I've noticed most is how similar being on Twitter was to my last job before I went mad, caught covid and became a crip. As you'll recall, I used to work in a call centre, and it sucked. And it especially sucked when our managers decided to outsource the work of the specialist department I used to work in to a centre in a country ran by a homophobic dictator because of his country's 'looser regulatory environment'. Woooooo! Keep sponsoring those Prides guys! 

The new department I got moved to was busier. Much busier, And suddenly I got the full experience of genuinely being battered by call after call after call. Where once I had had time to do all the admin that I was required to do for each customer without having to take myself off the phones, I now found myself trying to get it taken care of in the course of calls themselves, to minimise my hold time - all while Giving The Customer My Full Attention and Having Real Conversations, obviously. It was stress of a kind I'd never experienced, and I've worked retail over Christmas. But the thing about a physical queue is that it has an end you can see. Even if more and more people keep joining it you can work it down. All you see in a call centre is a number. And that number rarely goes down. And it hardly ever reaches zero. Unless something's gone wrong. 

Oh, how we all used to pray things would go wrong. 

Of course the customer doesn't see this side of the affair. All they hear is the hold music, constantly interrupted by recorded declarations that Your Call Is Important To Us, reminders that You Are 89th In The Queue and constant patronising interjections that this is so much easier to do online. It's no wonder that even the nicest customers were a little tetchy by the time they got through to a human. But let's be honest: this is Britain. Nice customers were rare. More common by far were angry, lazy, judgemental scum who more often than not just wanted someone to shout at to make them feel better about their own mistakes: their own inability to remember that some places are shut on Bank Holidays, that debts generally have to be paid, that it doesn't matter how much money they have in their bank account we could not, in fact, do things for them which were illegal and certainly couldn't agree to do that kind of thing on the phone. If you've worked in one of these places, you know the kind of thing - and the vitriol that results when you tell these entitled creeps no. 

And how did I choose to spend my lunchtimes, and the fifteen minute breaks I was lucky to work enough hours to qualify for? I spent them browsing Twitter. I mean, not the whole time - during lunch I'd usually do a little reading, whether on break or lunch I'd usually have to piss - but like most of us these days I would scroll on the toilet. And there were always notifications coming in: replies, retweets, and likes. I would sit by the canteen window, my lunch on the bar, a book in my hand, my phone laid to one side but within easy reach like an ashtray. And every now and then it would vibrate...

And because I was a trans woman on Twitter the replies I got were often every bit as vicious, as vituperative, as vile as the abuse I would receive from angry customers. 

Sickening monsters from the 80s with genitals on the brain who speak by farting marsh gas. Yep, that's terverts, alright!

I'm not saying getting abused on Twitter is the exclusive purview of us trannies, obviously. You get the same kind of crap if you're black, or brown, or gay, or a woman, or espouse left-wing views...regular readers will be aware I tick three of those boxes too, though it's by no means an exhaustive list. In a society which is systemically racist, cissexist, misogynist and riddled with neoliberalism, it would be a miracle if Twitter didn't replicate those dynamics. What's different is the speed. Just like the queues on the call centre phones, the Twitter queue was neverending. 

But the clever bit was in amongst the tides of shit there would be flecks of gold. A genuinely valuable reply. An incisive quote-tweet. A dis that was, at least, original and well-constructed rather than just some genitally obsessed weirdo yelling PENIS. And always, the steady stream of likes and retweets from good comrades. Appreciation. Interaction. Dopamine. 

Look, odds are you don't need me to tell you how shit Twitter is. There's a good chance you've experienced it yourself. But that dopamine hit is why we keep coming back. My employer's internal propaganda told me I was A Valued Member Of Staff and not just an emotional punchbag for the worst people in the country, but that was transparently fake. They didn't value me, they didn't see me as a person, they just needed me to fill a chair. But on Twitter! Real people, actual humans, were tapping a digital heart and telling me they liked the things I said. They showed things that I said to their friends! They got in touch and said I made them laugh - and I got such feedback almost instantly. My employers could go on about how much they valued me - but Twitter showed me I was loved. 

And that was almost worth the times it showed me how much I was hated.

This man has just seen a trans woman loving life online and hoo boy is he mad about it

Until, one day, it wasn't. Slowly, imperceptibly, Twitter became more like work. Not just in the sense of having to wade through more and more angry dickheads every day, but in the sense of constant, hostile surveillance. All social media is a surveillance operation to some extent, obviously (shout-out here to the poor sod from MI5 who has to read this blog), but just as they rely on us to self-report by logging in and giving updates, and because the Internet will always be shit under capitalism, Twitter decided to outsource the problem of moderating the gargantuan quantity of information passing through its site to its users too. Sure, they had An Algorithm as well but they seem to have relied mainly on reports from users. Which of course allowed terverts and their fascist incel chums to run mass reporting campaigns on anyone from groups they didn't like who was getting too popular. It's not lost on me that the alt I moved to after my main got nuked only started to experience problems when my retweets started getting into the thousands again. Make no mistake, this shit is organised. You might even call it cancellation...

But even before my alt got nuked too there was no escaping the fact that Twitter wasn't what it used to be, because people I liked and followed were dealing with bans too. And sure, they were coming back with alts but you had to faff on finding them...and people who didn't want to do this dance were forced to watch what they said to avoid having accounts - which in some cases they depended on for their livelihood - taken down. 

And meanwhile, of course, the abuse directed at us never stopped. Sometimes we scored victories, getting the penis-botherer Helen Staniland removed or sending Graham Linehan home to cry into his carbonara, but for the most part it seemed much harder to get a transphobe banned for actual abuse than to get a trans woman kicked off the platform for using the word 'prick'. Suddenly logging into Twitter was a lot like going to work in the neoliberal workplace: a zone of surveillance in which you constantly self-monitor, policing your expression, and where you can't help but notice people whose faces fit never face sanctions while you know you're being watched for the slightest deviation from the accepted behavioural norm. By the time they fired me, I wanted to get fired. 

And sure, adjusting has been hard. You do get withdrawal symptoms. How could you not? Your brain misses those constant little dopamine boosts. And even scrapping with terverts has its chemical reward, the adrenalin of conflict - not to mention the dopamine from people retweeting your disses. Suddenly, that's all cut off, and Facebook is shit methadone. You twitch. You pace. You drum your fingers. You start playing Wordle again. You think about buying a burner phone, setting up a protonmail address and starting over - but why? You'll probably just get kicked off again...

There are, however, benefits. I read a lot more now, and when I read I read for longer, because my brain is growing less and less habituated to the need to be constantly checking my phone - which I sometimes leave in the other room when I go for a piss now. Such social media as I remain on has a slower update pace, especially given that I tend to police my friends list elsewhere much more carefully than Twitter. I can watch whole films without interrupting myself now. It's too early, I think, to say what it's done to my writing - there is a discipline you develop as a writer from having to fit your thoughts into as close to 280 characters as possible, especially if you eschew textspeak, but on the other hand I now find it much easier to lay out a longer argument and write from point to point, even in a Facebook status update (and the last two entries on this blog consist of text from Facebook updates which I thought would benefit from being easier to find if I need to refer back to them). I hope that I am staying the right side of prolixity here. I don't know if I'm less angry - sometimes I feel more rage for not having the outlet. But overall, and importantly, although I miss the interaction with some individual tweeters, I don't miss Twitter itself, despite having been on it since 2009 - because Twitter is no longer the site that I joined in 2009, and hasn't been for quite some time. 

'A tiger? In Africa?'

 I think something we don't think about often enough is that cis people misgender other cis people all the time too, because cis people are really bad at guessing people's gender. This is because, it seems to me, people decide what gender to slot others into based on what psychologists call a schema - a sort of heuristic concept, not an ideal but a generalised notion of 'a man' and 'a woman' and maybe if they're very progressive they have a schema for what they think an enby looks like too. 

When encountering new people, they compare them to this schema and the more points of agreement with one or the other they make a guess. And this is where it comes unstuck, because there is more variation within the same gender than between genders. Which means tons of us, trans and cis, don't fit the schema most people use for 'woman', and vice versa. Think of all those butch cis women who keep getting hassle from the toilet police while they don't notice passing femme trans women because the latter ironically have more points of similarity to their schema.

The easiest way out of this is probably to just stop trying to guess and ask people, but (aside from, in Britain, the existential cultural horror of having to have a real conversation with anyone), the reason humans like to use heuristics and schema is that most of us are lazy bastards and resent having to use the massive brains evolution gave us (evolutionary psychology is a pseudoscience which tries to justify this laziness by saying we need the spare cognitive capacity to keep an eye out for a sabretooth tiger) and this, I feel, is one of the factors behind what we might call basic transphobia, as opposed to full-blown terversion: the resentment of intellectually lazy people at being required to be slightly less intellectually lazy (god knows how these dullards would cope with an actual smilodon but I'm guessing not well). 

This, of course, can metastasize into full-blown terversion when the lazy arse becomes obsessively resentful of trans people for the unpardonable crime of making their life slightly more difficult, which gradually develops into the profound sexual obsession with trans people that characterises that deeply unhappy character, the tervert (normal people do not have to take photographs of themselves in posh restaurants doing their best non-Duchenne smiles with the caption 'look how much happy funtimes we are having' to prove they're having a good time, great sesh photos just happen). Ironically their overdedication to not having to do a tiny bit of new thinking leads to their brains constantly overthinking in a way that makes them miserable. 

TL;DR transphobia is lazy, ignorant, and proves you're thinking in an outmoded way, possibly because you labour under the unconscious delusion you might have to fight a massive cat. 

Legitimate Concerns is a book by Wendy Cope

 I came across the following image online the other day, and it struck a chord: 

It struck a chord because as a trans person I am very familiar with the caring, 'concerned' attitude the cis people in this person's life displayed by outing them to their parents as an act of 'safeguarding' which tragically, completely unexpectedly, led to them becoming homeless. 

You see, a lot of times cis people harm trans people out of 'concern' for our wellbeing. When Chelsea Manning was a political prisoner of the United States government, her torturers made her conditions as unpleasant as possible on the grounds of 'concern' that she was at risk of self-harming. Many trans people, myself included, are PREVENTED from accessing surgeries by the very clinic system which is supposed to help us get them, again on grounds of 'concern' for how long it may take us to recover from them. 

We see through your 'concern' for us. 

Until trans people are given the same right to make mistakes and be indulged as cis people, don't complain when we point out we are treated as second-class citizens. 

Yeah yeah

 I now realise Eddie v Sammy wasn't on Dynamite on Wednesday and it isn't getting shown until Rampage tonight so there was a mistake in my last post BITE ME

'Rubbish! He's not hurt. He's only acting!': 'Vengeance on Varos', TV wrestling, and sadopopulism

 Between excavating the influences on my new pamphlet and protesting the state-mandated mourning period for Mrs Windsor, we haven't looked at anything to do with Doctor Who for a while. How fortunate, then, that last night my rewatch of the series, which has now reached the Colin Baker Era, brought me face-to-face with the frankly astonishing piece of television called 'Vengeance on Varos'. 

The Doctor and Peri are surprised to see I've not used this as an excuse to use that picture of Soldeed again

When we last checked in with the Time Lord of the Classic Series, he was dressed up in a ridiculous costume and regarded with suspicion. In a sense, then, not much has changed by the time we get to 'Vengeance on Varos', except for the rather important fact that at this point the costume is being worn by a different actor and the suspicion is now non-diegetic, with a series of increasingly poor decisions by John Nathan-Turner's production team leading the show to shed viewers, in some cases quite dramatically (with a million people who saw the first episode of the previous serial, 'Attack of the Cybermen', not bothering to tune in for the second). As usual, my advice is to check out TARDIS Eruditorum for the full story, but essentially 'Black Orchid' marked the last standalone before a run of tales which relied on as their 'hook' the idea of some villain or monster from the classic series returning. The producers played this up with great fanfare for the 20th anniversary series, but in fact it extends a long way either side of that: between 'Black Orchid' and the serial we're discussing today, the 1980s Who viewer has seen the astonishing returns of the Cybermen, Omega, the Mara, the Black and White Guardians, Rassilon, the Sea Devils and the Silurians (in a bumper team-up that's a strong contender for worst story in the show's entire history), the Daleks and most recently the Cybermen again, and the Master has popped up with a regularity not seen since the days of Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado duking it out. There have been times when the show has opted to introduce a more original threat,  most notably in 'Frontios' and Peter Davison's televisual swansong 'The Caves of Androzani', regarded by many fans as the greatest Doctor Who story of all time, but the story of the show during this period is largely one of relying on 'big returns' to goose the viewing figures without making sure that (a) the episodes involving these returning characters are actually any good or (b) that the audience are properly brought back up to speed with who, say, Omega is (given that the last time we met him was two whole Doctors ago). 

They see me rollin', Tractatin'

But for my purposes in this essay I want to track a trend during the Nathan-Turner era other than the show's continual referral back to past continuity and gradual diminution in quality, which is the way the show keeps getting kinkier. This really seems to kick off once Davison has replaced Tom Baker, with the Master, in 'Castrovalva', making use of a computer which will evidently only work if he ties Adric up in it like Robin in the 1960s Batman series and it just...keeps going. In 'Kinda', the Mara has Tegan straight-up acting like Amanda Donohoe in Lair of the White Worm (which the serial interestingly predates by some years), a persona she reprises in 'Snakedance', while 'Earthshock' sees her swapping her air stewardess uniform for a Ripleyesque jumpsuit in which she can run around shooting Cybermen with hunky space Marines. Once Vislor Turlough replaces Adric in the crew things get kicked up a notch: 'Enlightenment' features queer space pirates led by a gloriously camp Queen with a sideline in sissy hypno and the TARDIS crew getting togged up in PVC 'space-wetsuits' that make them look as if they're trying a bit too hard to gain entry to an exclusive bondage nightclub. 

'Planet of Fire' sees the introduction of Peri, added to the show in an early foreshadowing of the Heteronormativity Enforcement Hour and described by Jonathan Dennis in his Black Archive book on this serial as 'the most blatant expression' of the 'treatment of the companion as something "for the dads"'. And thus do we arrive at 'Vengeance on Varos', a serial which opens with a shot of an oiled, half-naked Jason Connery chained to a wall and writhing and just piles on the kink from there. Okay, yeah, it's kinda homoerotic but it isn't as if people are watching and and visibly getting off on his suffering. Oh they are. Yeah, well, alright but it isn't as if everyone is wearing the kind of Nazi uniform Hitler would have designed if he had the same aesthetic sense as Liberace. Oh they are. Well, look, at least there isn't a character being hosed down by beefcakes dressed as Spartans. Oh bloody Hell there is. Right. But at least no-one's running around in a mask or anything. Oh hang on, here's chief torturer Quillam. Alright! But at least there isn't any of that furry shit going on!

Oh for fuck's sake.

This time, though, there's a justification for all the kink, and the fact that this serial is the most violent the show's been since the Hinchcliffe era: 'Vengeance on Varos' is about violence as entertainment. The torture sequences in the Punishment Dome are broadcast for the amusement of a viewing public on Varos itself, and exported as tapes to thrillseekers on other planets. The usual interpretation of this is that this is the show making a comment about the 'video nasties' moral panic, and there are good grounds for that, but I want to introduce another possible target into the mix: the (at the time) coming threat of satellite television, particularly Sky, and its (especially to the Reithians at the BBC) terrifying ratings juggernaut - WWF wrestling. 

This Doc 'n' Wrestling connection is suggested by the 'Greek chorus' characters, the Varosian viewers Arak and Etta, played by Stephen Yardley and Sheila Reid respectively. Arak's declaration while watching Connery's rebel, Jondar, getting tagged with a laser beam that 'he's not hurt. He's only acting!' was a familiar complaint to fans of kayfabe combat, and Reid is a different kind of stereotypical British wrestling fan - the grandmotherly old woman thoroughly absorbed in the sadomasochistic spectacle (witness both her general bloodthirstiness and her dreamily observing that Martin Jarvis's Governor must be very strong to endure three losing votes in a row). It's easy to imagine Reid's character going down to York Hall to poke the heels with knitting needles, as such fans were wont to do. Traditional British all-in wrestling, fought under the Mountevans rules, was in decline at the time 'Vengeance on Varos' aired, with World of Sport, on which it featured, having been cancelled and replaced with a wrestling-only show which ITV kept moving around the schedules, UK TV wrestling having, rather like Doctor Who at the time, entered its 'being dicked about by the executives' period. But in 1983 the Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch had taken a 65% share in the imaginatively named Satellite Television company, whose name he would change to Sky Channel the following year, and from the start of Murdoch's involvement in satellite TV broadcasts of WWF wrestling were part of the package of American imports he offered. And while, for technical and legal reasons, most Brits could only receive Sky as part of cable packages, among cable audiences the WWF shows were surpassing BBC shows in the ratings. 

How are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm when they've seen Hulk Hogan?

The BBC might not have liked it, but they could see it coming: if you wanted to imagine the future of TV in 1985, you would imagine a bright yellow boot stomping on a foreign heel's face forever. And 'Vengeance on Varos', with its postmodern first-episode cliffhanger in which Jarvis' Governor directs the programme while we watch,  was made by people with high televisual literacy, who would have been aware of coming trends. Video nasties were clearly part of the package of things being referenced, but far from the only one: consider, for example, how the serial foreshadows both 1987's film adaptation of The Running Man, and shows like Gladiators and The Crystal Maze. 

Predicting the late 80s wrestling boom is small potatoes, however, when compared to the fact that the serial also manages to predict a political trend that wouldn't even be given a name until 2017, however: what Timothy Snyder calls sadopopulism: 

Snyder explains the concept in more detail in the video above, but I like to describe it as 'voting to hurt the other guy'. The idea is that governments, in thrall to corporate oligarchs, find themselves having to pursue policies which immiserate the very people who vote for them. Unable to offer any positive hope for the future, then, they instead offer their voters not the pleasure of seeing life get better for everyone, but the sadistic enjoyment of seeing the 'others' hurt more than them. Sadopopulism explains an awful lot of contemporary British and American politics, though Snyder developed the concept based on his studies of contemporary Russia. It's an element of what I've called trollstalgia, and part of the reason for the turn I identified in my essay on 'Fear Her' away from New Labour's focus on psychological methods of managing disaffected youth to the Tory approach of just out-and-out baiting them. The folks over at Podcasting is Praxis describe the British dream as 'watching your neighbour being led away by the police': that's sadopopulism!

And sadopopulism is the political system of Varos, where the Chief Officer colludes with the oligarch Sil to quite literally weaken the Governor by forcing him to submit to public votes which, when they go against him, lead to his televised physical torture (in the novelisation, the serial's writer Philip Martin clarifies that positive votes lead to the Governor having his energy restored by the same process, working in reverse). Arak, in particular, takes pleasure in the Governor's suffering in the first episode, though his opinion changes in the second - the implication being that the Doctor's irruption into the Punishment Dome broadcasts changes things by giving the viewers a hero to root for instead of just a victim to take pleasure in punishing. 

The resolution of 'Vengeance on Varos' is a lot like the end of the Williams-era serial 'The Sun Makers': after vanquishing an inhuman oligarch, the Doctor and his companion leave the people of the formerly oppressed planet to find their own way forward. The ending, however, is left a lot more ambiguous, as we cut back to Arak and Etta, who muse on the fact that they're free - but wonder what they're going to do now, with nothing on the telly. Where do you go after sadopopulism? What do you do when you can no longer watch someone writhe as they pile on the pain? Well, don't ask me - I need to wrap this thing up so I can watch AEW Dynamite. I'm hoping Eddie Kingston is gonna beat the snot out of that poisonous little twink Sammy Guevara. The cocky prick deserves it. 

And to think I made it through a whole essay without mentioning how Quillam predicts Masked Kane!

On the Oxford Comma

 I have no strong opinions one way or the other about the Oxford Comma because having strong opinions about the Oxford Comma is the kind of tedious pedantry self-obsessed, ignorant, priggish bores think makes up for their complete lack of either genuine intelligence or anything resembling actual character. 

A self-obsessed, ignorant, and priggish bore who thinks tedious pedantry makes up for its complete lack of either genuine intelligence or anything resembling character. 

Don't Stop The Clocks

I started watching the walking videos during the first lockdown. The initial fascination was the empty streets: normally busy areas like Piccadilly Circus or the South Bank completely empty of the life that used to fill them. When the lockdowns began to lift the attraction was in watching people returning to those same streets - and now, it's in the opportunity to witness street life in all corners of the globe - London yes but also New York, Tokyo, Barcelona, Seoul - these days, you name pretty much any city and someone in it will have strapped a Go-Pro to themselves and took to the streets. I just tried it for Lagos, Nigeria and sure enough, yep, someone's done it. Buenos Aires? You got it. Wanna walk alongside the Ganges in Varanasi? You can. It isn't just the great world cities either - if you want, you can take a virtual walk around Macclesfield, or Yeovil, or Halifax - whether in Yorkshire or Nova Scotia.

You can even have a look around my manor if you like. 

Why, today of all days, am I writing about the walking videos? Well, partly because it seemed appropriate given Saturday's entry. And partly because these videos tell us a truth about city life which we won't see in footage on the news of London today, with the normal business of city life stilled this time not because of a virus that threatens all humanity but in order to cosset the grief of a single absurdly powerful family, the normally active, milling crowds replaced with a passive audience watching a single coffin be escorted to Westminster Abbey. 

And I don't use the word 'cosset' lightly. One of the most heartening things about watching someone walk part of the length of The Queue on Saturday was watching as it got away from the display of roided-up security theatre in Westminster and started snaking along the opposite side of the river, where all the usual overpriced bars and allegedly artisanal food trucks were still hawking their wares, and where people outside of the queue were enjoying the riverside as they would on any other sunny summer night on the South Bank. 

And that is one of the lessons about grief I learned from having to watch all the Jubilee celebrations going on while I was mourning the death of my mother back in May. It's what every normal person who grieves has to deal with. The outsize popularity of Auden's Funeral Blues is owed mostly to its inclusion in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but there is a reason Richard Curtis chose it for that film. Nothing is more human than the urge to stop the world from turning in our grief. That urge is understandable. But it is also right and proper that the world frustrates the urge. Life does go on. As Auden observed in his better, far less lachrymose Musee des Beaux Arts the greatest truth about our personal suffering is that it happens while others are 'eating or opening a window or just walking dully along', and that even those who are witness to the tragedy, such as, in the painting by Breughel to which Auden refers, 'the expensive, delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky' - or, one thinks, a queue of people stretching from Parliament to Southwark Park - have 'somewhere to get to, and sail...calmly on'. 

Unless those who happen to be grieving happen also to have the surname Windsor. 

There are lots of things I object to about the Monarchy. They are an institution which represents the worst evils in the world, and are personally guilty of many of those evils themselves. They are the beneficiaries of privilege, private law, in its most literal sense - Elizabeth Windsor interfered in over 1000 laws to prevent them affecting her via the 'Queen's Consent' process.  A lot of that interference was motivated by a desire to protect her wealth, a protection she very generously extends to her friends among the ultra-wealthy (like that nice Mr Epstein) via the network of 'Crown Dependencies', aka tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions, over which she until very recently presided, and which her son Charles now oversees.

But another thing I object to about the institution of the Monarchy is how badly it deforms the people who belong to it. We are going to see a lot of evidence of how deformed, psychologically, those people can get in the reign of Charles Windsor, if his inability to tolerate leaky pens is any indication. And one of the reasons why they become so warped as individuals is because of days like today when, uniquely of all families in the UK, of all families in the world, the Windsors are allowed to do the very things Auden's funereal poem lists as examples of the absurd and overreaching desires of grief, and to bring a stop to the business of ordinary, ongoing life he writes about in Musee des Beaux-Arts. The traffic policemen may not quite wear black cotton gloves, but they are out in force on the streets of the capital today, along with members of every branch of the armed services and, no doubt, many plainclothes SIS operatives, all acting in concert to ensure no peal of mocking laughter or cry of accusation is allowed to spoil the officially mandated national mood. The shops are shut (with a few noble exceptions - I shan't name the branch of Subway which was my only option this morning for fear of sending royalist reprisals their way, but I am pathetically grateful in the way only a fat person in receipt of a greasy breakfast can be that they chose to stay open), roads are closed, and radio stations are strictly adhering to the two mandated playlists of 'Mood One: sad music' and 'Mood Two: saddest music'. Every news broadcaster local to this country, and even Al Jazeera English, who are usually my go-to when the rest of the news is full of Royal weddings, broadcast the funeral. 

The most important of grief's lessons is that the world doesn't share in your grief. That is something which those in The Queue who were grieving (as opposed to those who came out to gawp in the tradition of the London Mob) were brought face-to-face with on Saturday night. That is something I had to face up to when I sat outside a pub in Tynemouth covered in Jubilee bunting crying over the death of my mother. And it's a lesson which Heaven and Earth will be moved to protect our pampered Royals - and you do not live to 96 without some heavy pampering, whatever sycophants might say about the late Mrs Windsor's 'selfless service' - from ever having to learn. 

Let's take a walk

 Bill Bailey has a bit about watching TV in a hotel room while on tour in the US, watching the news and realising that in the 'and finally' spot where one would normally put a funny story or something upbeat, preferably involving a cute animal if possible, the producers had chosen to put - a story about something British happening. You know the kind of thing - Trooping of the Colour, the Queen having one of her (only) seemingly endless celebrations of the fact she was Queen, or one of the Princes or other opening this or raising awareness of that or being surprisingly down to earth and informal to the Other. To the Yanks, we're the planet's funny local colour.

Greece never had to endure this from Rome, you find yourself thinking. Yes, the Romans could and did patronise their Greek forebears but at least they couldn't do it televisually. But now the American Empire very much can do that to its forerunner and while I will be the first to condemn both - I did after all publish a book called England is the Enemy and my latest work is similarly critical -  it still stings, man. To be insulted by these fascists is so degrading. 

I am typing this while listening to the audio from a YouTube video of someone walking part of the length of The Queue. 

It's a reminder that while all this is happening, while there are soldiers in the streets and so many barriers in some places that they seem like checkpoints in some Children of Men future, there are still just ordinary Londoners going about their business, people working, jogging, filming YouTube videos, advancing their own personal agendas regardless of the official narrative of the shellshocked nation. 

A lot is written about the democratisation of media brought about by the proliferation of digital cameras, smartphones, wi-fi etc etc and 99% of it is hype. But in a week like this I am very aware of who is pointing their cameras at what, and why. 

It's a Merry Motley Meme Dump!

 Busy with other things today so I may not get the chance to do a full update. Therefore enjoy the finest memes I have made since the last time I did one of these posts!

First, Doctor Who stuff: 

Resurrection of the Daleks (1984)

Frontios (1984) 

Planet of Fire (1984)

The King's Demons (1983)

The Awakening (1984)

And now, the wrestling memes:

Philip Roth wrote a novel about Eddie Kingston's beefs:

Tasteless memes about the passing of Liz, Quen ov all r harts:

A single solitary The Prisoner meme:

And finally, I know what you're all saying 'these are great AJ but what we really want is a photo of Le Corbusier playing basketball'. Fear not friends, I've got you covered: 

Le Corbs believed playing basketball twice a week gave him 'moral power'. Evidently not enough to stop him sucking up to the Vichy Regime though. Maybe he should have tried to fit in an extra session.

So, Stewart Lee, then

 Here is a picture of me taken on the 19th of December 2019, exactly one week after the disastrous UK General Election of that year, and not even an hour after coming round from anaesthesia after having my arms operated on to remove abscesses caused by my hidradenitis suppurativa. The dot in the centre of my forehead is not me being culturally appropriative, it's just a spot.

Out of shot in this photo is the book I brought with me to hospital, Stewart Lee's March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016-2019. I can't remember if I was rereading Lee's book or reading it for the first time during my visit as a day patient to the RVI's disturbingly-named Abscess Pathway, but I do remember that I was reading it because, having just recently seen the British electorate make possibly the second stupidest decision I had ever seen it make, I hoped to draw some comfort from reading one of the finest comic minds of our generation railing against the fatuity of his countrymen in making their stupidest decision.

It wasn't an uncomplicated pleasure. Lee was anti-Brexit but had also, as Juliet Jacques makes clear in that article I'm always quoting, 'eventually aligned himself with liberals who blamed Corbyn for the EU Referendum Result and consequent Brexit' and 'named pro-EU heroes Ken Clarke and Jess Phillips alongside Gina Miller and Adbusters copyists Led By Donkeys in his "stars of track and field" for 2019'. Worse still, in the introduction to March of the Lemmings, musing on his contemporaries now he has become a semi-regular newspaper columnist (or as he describes himself 'a cat that does a smell in David Mitchell's lovely garden'), Lee delivers himself of the opinion that 'Marina Hyde is the best of the legitimate journalist-humourists', which marks him as one of what Mic Wright calls 'a certain strain of middle-aged men [who] explode...with excitement on Twitter' every time Hyde (real name Marina Elizabeth Catherine Dudley-Williams, daughter of 2nd Baronet Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams) drops a new one. As much as I might love Lee's acerbic humour, I could no longer be the ideal audience member Lee has spoken of, who 'didn't laugh but...agreed the fuck out of it'. Critical distance had set in, for me as for many in Lee's audience, with the realisation that we did not share his 'patronising liberal delusion' to the extent that we had once thought. 

All that being said, March of the Lemmings is still a very funny book, especially when you're on fentanyl after having your armpits slashed open. The columns are hit and miss, sometimes extremely funny, sometimes wry, very occasionally infuriating in their political ignorance, but the text of Lee's 2019 standup show, Content Provider, is excellent, and throughout, Lee's footnotes add a third dimension to the comedy, the literary equivalent of the cutaways with Armando Ianucci or Chris Morris on Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle: a chance to wring extra humour out of Lee's attempts to explain himself. These footnotes also give us a chance to see Lee reflecting on his craft: I've learned a lot which has helped me as a performer from reading Lee's previous annotated stand-up sets, collected in How I Escaped My Certain Fate and The "If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One" EP, and the same holds true for March of the Lemmings, even if I did find myself at times disagreeing with the politics of this liberal idiot. 

It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I approached Snowflake, the first of two new Stewart Lee specials which were supposed to air on subsequent Sundays until the death of Elizabeth Windsor sent the BBC into puritan overdrive and the NO COMEDY IN THE FUNERAL TIMES policy which this blog chooses to consciously oppose with our Motley Jamboree. There had been some hope that the second special, Tornado, would air very late this Friday, rather like that creepy horror strand Richard O'Brien used to host which usually featured a b-movie, a short and an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Alas, however, in looking this up to verify it I now find that clearly the BBC's Comedysmeller Pursuivant has not been fooled by this schedule burial, and thus Tornado has been pushed back to October 9th. 

You now see, perhaps, why I felt it was important to make at least some token opposition to this state-mandated misery. 

Fortunately, Snowflake demonstrates that Lee's columnist persona has not contaminated his standup character yet. I suspect it works best as a double-header with Tornado, because at only an hour long it's only half the length of Content Provider, and thus, after a slow start, it feels like things are only getting warmed up when they come to a halt with Lee reprising his 'the comedian abruptly does some singer-songwriter guitar bollocks' bit from the Milder Comedian show. That's not the only old bit of material he reprises, either: this half of the show is replete with callbacks to earlier ones, from the guitar-bothering to a running gag about Boris Johnson to an absolutely brilliant reworking of the 'political correctness as misunderstood health and safety legislation' bit from Lee's first comeback show after getting sued into oblivion by fundamentalist Christians for having the temerity to write Jerry Springer: The Opera. Even a segment about a very different form of reprisal, in which Lee takes issue with criticism of his act from Tony Parsons, calls back to his anxious ruminations about Frankie Boyle's strictures on forty-year-old comics on the Milder EP while the line 'vomit into the eyes of the infant Christ' as the climax of the political correctness remix recalls the epic vomageddon which concludes the '90s Comedian special. 

Again, this probably works better when followed by Tornado, in which Lee ponders his place in the modern comedy environment. But in the context of Snowflake alone, the whole thing really builds to a bit about Ricky Gervais and the extent of his commitment to truly 'saying the unsayable' which in many ways represents the climax of one aspect of Lee's comedy. Lee has long said that his ideal set would not consist of jokes, routines or even words, and would simply be a succession of meaningless sounds: at long last, in Snowflake, Lee has achieved this, and it is of course the funniest bit of the show. The first time I saw it, I went into some kind of altered state of consciousness from laughter, and its power is barely diminished on a second viewing undertaken for writing this article. It's not so much why this particular bit is funny that's the mystery of it, but the way it keeps getting funnier. It made me wonder if the demonic invocation with which the new political correctness routine climaxes isn't actually part of the conjuration, a supplication to otherworldly entities performed so they might bestow on Lee the Gift of Tongues that allows him to transform these quite literally barbaric yawps into something sublime (he does spend a lot of time hanging out with Alan Moore after all). It's comedy alchemy. 

He was wrong about Corbyn, yes. And the Marina Hyde thing suggests a worrying degree of aesthetic slippage. But unlike a lot of his colleagues 'putting on an exotic display for the court' in the words of Chris Morris, Lee is still actually funny. Which has to count for something, even if that something is 'getting cancelled because a bunch of toffs want us to be miserable this week'.  

See you in the funny pages: Elizabeth Sandifer's America a Prophecy

 Of course, one of the difficulties for a blog like this, in deciding to provide a deliberate counterpoint to the turgid, manufactured displays of national mourning with which our broadcasters are bombarding us by focusing on mirthful subjects is, well, mirth isn't really something we do that often round these parts. Polemic, analysis, and a certain waspish sarcasm, yes, but we're rarely what you'd call laugh-out-loud funny. But there are ways of addressing humour as a topic without yourself being a comedian. Though as it happens, the subject of today's entry, the latest instalment of Elizabeth Sandifer's blog series America a Prophecy, is a great example of writing about humour seriously while also being extremely funny. 

Snuffy Smith as psychogeographic psychopath

America a Prophecy is a blog series, published yearly, interrogating the contents of a single instalment of the US syndicated newspaper comics strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, by John Rose, which ran as part of a commemoration of the 9/11 attacks called Cartoonists Remember 9/11. As Sandifer explains, this saw 'a total of ninety-five ongoing newspaper strips set aside their Sunday strip to respond to the memory of 9/11'. The first instalment was published ten years after the strip's original publication, on the eleventh of September 2021. The second instalment went live this past Sunday. The next will reach us on 9/11/23. 

It would be the easiest thing in the world to simply mine these comical commemorations for cheap laughs, given that, as Sandifer explains, 'what this meant in practice was that Sunday comics sections were filled wall to wall with mawkish and poorly designed 9/11 strips', but that publishing schedule should be your clue that the kind of laughs she's interested in are more expensive. Here, though, I will take any opportunity for a cheap gag (especially when it gives me an excuse to break up the text with an image) so here, as an example of the kind of thing which ran as part of Cartoonists Remember 9/11, is the Todd the Dinosaur strip commemorating that fateful day: 

It helps to consider America a Prophecy alongside Sandifer's other major projects, especially the one which has probably been referred to the most in the course of recent entries, TARDIS Eruditorum, which will henceforth be referred to as TE to save time. TE is one of the most remarkable works of pop-cultural criticism ever undertaken by one person: a 'psychochronography' of the beloved BBC television show Doctor Who in all its forms, from its first episode in 1963 to the end of the Peter Capaldi era (and beyond: subscribers to Sandifer's Patreon can enjoy her thoughts on the Whittaker era before they go up on the main Eruditorum Press site). Sandifer explains psychochronography as the 'position[ing of] any cultural object at the centre of one's vision' to 'through sufficiently thorough exploration...understand the larger world in which it exists'. 

Thus, TE tells not just the ongoing story of the Doctor and their regenerations, but also the larger story of the country and world in which Doctor Who was produced and enjoyed, the changing nature of its fan reception, the changes in the media by which it was produced, and the media around it. Lots of people will tell you the superficial effects the arrival of Star Wars in 1977 had on Doctor Who: Sandifer can discuss what they mean, both in terms of the show and its wider culture. And because Sandifer is very upfront about the fact that psychochronography, like psychogeography, is both a critical and a magical practice, it sometimes goes to very odd places: the entry for Logopolis, Tom Baker's televisual swansong as the Fourth Doctor, takes the form of a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' story based on the Kabbalah. 

Doccy Who references, of course, mean we have an excuse to shoehorn Soldeed and Janet Ellis into yet another entry

So America a Prophecy is an attempt to prove the validity of the psychochronographic method by focusing on an ultra-limited text: a single instalment of a single newspaper strip, as opposed to the sprawling multimedia entity that is Doctor Who. But by setting it in its contexts, it's already clear from two instalments that Sandifer is going to be able to mine this single strip for a lot of insights about the culture that produced it (the title for the next instalment, 'The Only Thing that Stops a Bad Guy with an Emotion is a Good Guy with an Emotion', makes me wish I didn't have to wait a year to read it): the latest instalment, setting the strip in its broader context of the history of newspaper comic strips, taught me a load of stuff I never knew about that medium. 

And as I say, it's also extremely funny. Wisely, Sandifer foregrounds this aspect in the opening of the first entry, setting up an initial tension between what she calls the Short Walk and Long Walk Hypotheses in terms of describing the diegetic peregrinations of the titular Snuffy Smith and his interlocutor Jughaid, before setting up the more serious non-diegetic dichotomy of how the story presents Snuffy's grief for those lost on 9/11. It reminds me a lot of this classic Stewart Lee routine, in which Lee uses set theory to deconstruct the classic hymn 'All Things Bright and Beautiful', written by Cecil Frances Alexander and usually set to the tune of the same name by William Henry Monk - a deconstruction which, like Sandifer's close-reading of the Snuffy Smith strip, hinges on an ironic reading of the source material: 

And actually, now that we've mentioned Stewart Lee...

The Motley Jamboree Begins

 As regular readers of this blog will know, my mother died at the end of May, the Sunday before the four-day weekend the Establishment of this country had gracefully set aside for us plebs to celebrate the long and pampered life of the racist paedophile-protector Elizabeth Windsor. I spent a week wanting the ground to swallow me up, wanting the world to burn away, wanting, frankly, to die because the pain of a stroke or a heart attack would hurt less than the grief - and the whole time I was surrounded by bunting, Union Flag tat and the general, nauseating KCACOsity of it all. 

So if you think I'm joining in this official 'period of mourning' bollocks you need your fucking head examined. 

So, as an act of disrespect to the passing of the Parasite in Chief in Her Idiot Hat, I will be suspending the 'Finding The Others' series, in which I hip you folks to some of the people whose work inspired Secrecy's Jurisdiction, until after Brenda's state funeral next Monday. In its place I intend to use this week to host a Motley Jamboree of satire, comedy, whimsy, mirth and, most important, mockery of the idea that we should all be sat at home rending our garments and beating our breasts in grief for a woman we never knew whose existence, for many of us, made our lives materially worse. I understand the BBC has suspended all comedy broadcasts for the same period (so clearly using the current situation to formalise what has, judging from their output, been a long-running policy) so, in a way, I like to think I will be providing an important national service by keeping morale up during this difficult time. 

And I can think of no better way to begin these ceremonies - especially given the absurd degree of post-mortem anilingualism we're to be witness to in the coming days - than with Jake Thackray's classic satire of all authority (including his own), 'The Bull': 

Meet the New Boss

Mr Charles Windsor - the man we are now expected to call King, following the death of his mother, Elizabeth - was mentored by a Royal paedophile, Louis Mountbatten, and called Jimmy Savile, Britain's most prolific sex offender, whose advice he sought repeatedly throughout his life, his 'best friend'. Indeed, so chummy was the quondam Prince with 'that nice Mr Savile' (in the words of the busybody Mary Whitehouse) that he allowed this bizarre little man to lick the arms of female staff in St James' Palace, including on one occasion Windsor's then wife, Diana, and even considered naming him as godfather to his son, Harry. 

Still, perhaps we shouldn't blame the man too much for the company he kept. He did, after all, endure an abusive upbringing, at the hands of his bullying father, Philip, who decided to toughen up his effete and sensitive young son by sending him to Gordonstoun School in Scotland, described by one of Charles' classmates as an environment in which 'bullying was virtually institutionalized and very rough', including from the housemaster of Charles' own dorm, Robert Whitby, a man described as 'a truly nasty piece of work' who 'imposed a form of martial law, with ritualized psychological and physical abuse'. 

Gordonstoun, to use a fantastic phrase from Andy Sharp's Phantoms of Liberty (collected in The English Heretic Collection, which we discussed yesterday) 'occupies the same cold parade ground' as the abusive naval training college HMS Ganges, and the Evangelical 'Bash Camps' operated by many British public schools, but infamous for the actions of the camp at Winchester, operated by another paedophile Mary Whitehouse chum, Sir John Smyth QC, who would later decamp to Zimbabwe to share his Christian love with the local children, living there until he died of a heart attack in 2017 after being asked to return to the UK for questioning about accusations of historical abuse which had emerged as part of the rash of enquiries in the wake of Charles and Mary's pal Jimmy's death. 

If Charles and Mary were united in their love for that nice Mr S, they also shared the epistolary habits of the busybody. Like Whitehouse, Charles is an inveterate writer of letters, a habit supposedly picked up during his days at Gordonstoun enduring the sort of abuse Mrs W's barrister liked to dish out. The infamous Black Spider Memos, the contents of which were made public in 2015, paint a portrait of Charles Windsor as a typical boorish media illiterate too given to believing what he reads in the paper, which is somewhat surprising for a man who has been getting monstered by the tabloids since the time he ordered cherry brandy in a pub on the Isle of Lewis when he was fourteen years old, and who sought the assistance of mediamancer Savile to try and overcome his unpopularity with the British public. Perhaps all the beatings he took on the rugger field actually did kick the empathy out of the sensitive boy? Well, not quite: he certainly displayed a great deal of empathy for pro-foxhunting weirdos the Countryside Alliance when he wrote to the Blair government in 2002 that if they were 'any other minority' they would get more protection. Lest Blair be in any doubt as to what the nonced-up heir was getting at, he spelled it out, saying that if farmers 'were black or gay [they] would not be being victimised or picked on' - this less than three years after the Admiral Duncan bombing. Elsewhere, Charles wrote to the then Lord Chancellor that 'our lives are becoming ruled by a truly absurd degree of politically correct interference' - that 'our' sounding particularly (indeed, truly) absurd from a man whose mum had her own personal opt-out from equality legislation so she didn't have to see any blacks in the Palace. 

Most famously, of course, Mr Windsor Has Opinions About Architecture. Jonathan Meades, this country's best writer on the built environment who isn't called Owen Hatherley, described Charles as 'the most ploddingly dogged pupil' of the 'retrophiliac scholarship' of Country Life magazine's architectural criticism. He described the Tricorn Centre, one of the great Brutalist masterpieces of this philistine country's history (now, of course, demolished) as ' a mildewed lump of elephant droppings', a simile Meades rightly decries as 'as vulgar as it is visually inept'. 

A mildewed lump of elephant droppings, apparently

 But Chaz isn't just out to carp, oh no. Unlike the naysayers and nattering nabobs of negativism who, no doubt, are the very people hemming us in with 'politically correct interference', Windsor doesn't just criticise from the sidelines. He has championed, and supported financially, the extension of Dorchester known (perhaps after Mr Savile's two favourite activities?) as Poundbury. This scheme was begun by Chuck's chum and favourite architect Leon Krier, who the Telegraph describe as 'the feted traditional architect', which is certainly one way to describe a disciple of Albert Speer. 

So, then, ecce homo: a moralising friend of paedophiles, a philistine bore who nevertheless possesses the nearest thing his wretched family has to an 'artistic temperament', a victim of physical abuse who describes himself chillingly as 'one of the people on whom corporal punishment worked'. In the spirit of the toast to his late mother included in Secrecy's Jurisdiction then, ladies, gentlemen, people of all genders and none...I give you His Majesty.