The Ballad of CeCe McDonald

Trigger warning: this poem discusses a transphobic attack and its aftermath. Certain verses also refer to prison rape. If either of these things are likely to trigger you, feel free not to read.

CeCe McDonald copped a plea.

Guilty. Manslaughter. Second degree.
She had to. There’d be no fair trial.
Forty-one more months in jail

the best she could expect from them,

the white, cisgendered, Minnesota men
whose prejudice would seal her fate,
ruling ‘inadmissible’ the hate

inscribed on the so-called victim’s flesh,

but saying that her one bounced cheque
would be allowed to testify
against her virtue. Cheques don’t lie,

but swastika tattoos may prove

mere relics of a misspent youth.
That Schmitz said go back to Africa
was, the whites said, neither here nor there:

a man was stabbed, and CeCe’s race

made Freeman think he had a case.
Freeman, who’d tried anti-fascists
but let Darrell Evanovich’s

killer walk, had CeCe bound

in custody. The facial wound
that she’d received that night turned septic,
left untreated, grew and festered,

as CeCe festered in their jail,

each day eroding CeCe’s will
to fight, and making Freeman bold.
He’d show the press how he controlled

those elements – the blacks, the queers –

Tea Party voters tend to fear:
pandering to fears like these
keeps Blue Dog Freeman in his seat

and hapless CeCe in her cell,

while the Caucasian thugs who yelled
abuse and chased her through the streets
are free to party, laugh and eat,

drink beer and cheer at Vikings games

while CeCe languishes in chains
for standing ground that wasn’t hers
in the eyes of pallid jurors.

Meanwhile, Robert Zimmerman

– the dodgy judge, not Bob Dylan –
tells Fox News that his son George
had probable defensive cause

to shoot a black boy in the chest

at point-blank range, then flee arrest:
but George’s victim wasn’t white,
so George posed no risk of flight

(though he’d lain low for one whole month,

while press and police went on the hunt).
So Zimmerman was granted bail:
paid 15K and walked from jail,

where CeCe sits awaiting sentence,

hoping to serve out her penance
for the crime of keeping her friends safe
in a prison where she won’t be raped

by cis male guards and prisoners

with shivs or barks of ‘strip for search’,
a decency that isn’t certain
in the realm of men like Freeman,

governed only for some people,

who are not considered equal,
whatever patriotic lies
its blue-eyed children may imbibe

when they chant their morning pledge,

where millions teeter on the edge
of losing homes to bailed-out banks
while Mormon millionaire mountebanks

pledge to protect blastocysts

and cuff a quarter of the wrists
on Planet Earth, and shackle more:
oh, Amnesty are keeping score,

but who cares? We’re the Great Exception!

For rich white men we’ll make exemptions!
But if you’re not, well – just forget it.
Cop the plea. You’ll get no credit

from the local Fox affiliate.

Justice for all? You’re delirious!
The fact is that America
still operates a colour bar.

See CeCe, in her prison rack?
Her wrists, like most we cuff, are black.

                        *          *          *

CeCe McDonald has been sent to prison for the 'crime' of defening herself and her friends from a racist and transphobic attack. No attempt has been made to punish her attackers. Please sign the petition asking the Minnesota State Governor, Mark Dayton, to pardon her.

NaPoWriMo Poem Twenty-Two: May 'n' the Abu, a Hay(na)ku

May:
I deport.
You, May? Not!

*    *    *

Look, don't judge me, I'm three poems behind here! This is inspired by the prompt from Day 21 to write a hay(na)ku, a haiku-like poem, the lines having one word in the first line, two in the second, and three in the third, and by the continual difficulty the Home Secretary seems to be having in knowing what day of the week it is.

NaPoWriMo Poem Twenty-One: The Body of the Enemy

You tell me that you're zen
and all we have to do is wait
for the body of our enemy
to wash by on the river.

You tell me that everything happens,
and is happening, for a reason.

You don't know what 'teleological' means,
but when I explain you nod and say 'yeah, cool.'

I sit by the river, where I can see stones
amid the low-tide trickle. I wait.
A shopping trolley rusts.

I turn and walk away, passing, on the bridge,
a man in chinos and an All-Blacks shirt
carrying a cardboard Michael Gove.

*     *     *

Face-to-face (well, almost) with Cardboard Gove! I wasn't going to return to him yet, but suddenly the last verse of this one seemed like the perfect place to put him. But what happens now? Does Cardboard Gove get chucked in the river? Who knows?

NaPoWriMo Poem Nine: What We Talk About When We Talk About Gove

Nobody's noticed so far.
The Education Sec is sure of that.
His subordinates say he prefers to stand.
His silence is interpreted as pensive;
his pose as friendly, jocular, on-message.

His choosing to remain in Cabinet Rooms
even after Dave and Gideon leave
is seen as diligent, though there are whispers
that it shows he wants the top job.
Nobody wants to make a fuss though.
They all know he's Rupert's boy.

When sure the coast is clear,
the under-secretaries lift him up
and fold back his supports.
One takes the legs, the other holds the shoulders,
turned so that his glazed eyes face the fly
of a Dege & Skiner three-piece,
his plain white backing turned to face the world.

At close of play they prop him in the office.
The cleaner, mute, Nigerian - is she Nigerian?
Somewhere like that, anyway - bumps the Henry's nozzle
against his cardboard feet. Says nothing. No-one knows.
Nobody knows exactly when the real Gove disappeared, where he is.
And he looks convincing. Lifelike. Nothing's been said so far.

                    *                  *                  *

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem in another persona. Somehow, thinking through personalities to assume and write from, I thought of Michael Gove, the Education Secretary of Britain's unelected, mandate-less Tory-led Coalition Government. And then I remembered something I'd seen over the weekend. The NASUWT, Britain's largest teaching union, has been holding its conference this week, a conference traditionally visited by the Education Secretary. This year, Gove himself chickened out of going, and, deciding to compound his cowardice with a staggering degree of high-handed arrogance, he didn't send an underling from either his own Tory party, or the Liberal Democrats, very much the Richard Hammond to the Tories' Jeremy Clarkson.

It's usual for the General Secretary of the union to address the Education Secretary at conference. Sometimes this can be a jocular and friendly exchange, sometimes it can be more combative. Given that Gove's approach to Britain's education system seems to be that the way to improve it is to destroy it, it was pretty clear that this year Gove was going to have to sit there and take his lumps. The fact that the Secretary of Education couldn't take a telling-off from teacher gives you the measure of the man.

But this gave NASUWT General Secretary Chris Keates a problem. How could she deliver the address to Gove if he was too much of a scaredy-cat to show up? Fortunately, a solution was found. A cardboard cut-out of the Education Secretary was acquired, and Keates duly delivered her speech to this novelty Michael Gove standee.

This led me to wonder: what would it be like if the cardboard cut-out took over from Gove full-time? After all, in showing up to conference it had already shown considerably more courage than its real-life counterpart. And so...this is what resulted. I quite like the idea of Cardboard Gove in government. If nothing else, a 2D Education Secretary is unlikely to get any ideas about battling aliens.

NaPoWriMo Poem Seven: The Peculiar Beauty of Meat

The city burns. The engines race
without much hope. Our skin, soot-speckled,
dusted with the ash of others, shows where
it shows as molten as a furnace.

The cloth is offered to the bull,
the thinnest blade withdrawn from the hide.
The muscle makes a sucking noise and then
what was beneath begins to trickle forth.
The razor blade is slicing up the eye.

The neon lights the smoking woman's body.
Each inhalation reignites the tiny sun
decaying to a point between her fingers.
The gangs of men who roar outside the window
take on its hue as veins in temples throb,
boozy blood cells rushing
to the head and other parts.

The creature at the cross' foot is screaming,
like the Pope, like the monochrome mother,
like la carne maccelata,
like a Krakatoa sunset,
like what flows in a Whitechapel gutter,
like the girl who pounds the keys,
like the blood I'll never bleed,
like the police cars burning through the long hot summer

NaPoWriMo Poem Four: Scrawl from a Blue Room

Come here. It's time for your lesson.
You've taught us well, but it's your time to learn.
How it feels to be afraid. To be unwanted.
How it feels to be the bottom of the pile.

How it feels to hear every day
that we only matter when we're making trouble,
when one of you has to take one of us out
and your media blowhards make him out the hero.

We're here to teach you what it's like
to be made to feel your only worth
consists in meeting sales objectives
to keep some reptile yank in what he calls suspenders.

You're her to learn how we resist,
and we have to, as much as you hate it
because the fact that we resist reminds
you what you do is genocide.

Lower status monkeys die off quicker.
Lower status civil servants
are the first to clutch their chests.
Did you know that? I suspect you do.

You're a gunman who can't look along the barrel
but you never miss because it's point-blank range.
And you pull the trigger countless times each day:

When you ignore the girl who makes your morning latte.
When you treat the person on the helpdesk line
like a punchbag made of air. A service drone,
non-human, a passive bin for all your scrunched-up hatred.

Every back-slapping, bigoted joke you guffaw at
with your gang of mates at the end of the bar,
loud enough the quiet, bourbon-drinking girl
hears every word.

It's an epidemic you create. A genocide
of strokes, infarctions, self-inflicted cuts.
Immune responses going limp. You made this.
And you profit from it. And we're not supposed to fight?

Christmas Special: The Ballad of Private Manning

This Christmas, while many of us tuck into turkey and get progressively comatose on good red wine and the Dr Who Christmas Special, Private First Class Bradley (or more properly Breonna) Manning will be languishing in a prison cell at the behest of the US military and government, for the crime of exposing their dirty secrets. Therefore, I choose to mark Christmas with the following poem.

The Ballad of Private Manning

Vaclav Havel died today:
you spoke of freedom far away,
but in a courtroom in your land,
the witnesses denied the stand
told the story, gave the lie
to that song you sing, the flag you fly.
You are not brave, and neither are you free,
and though you claim it, you do not love liberty.
While Private Manning sits in jail
your Founding Fathers' dream has failed.

Your soldiers left Iraq this week
in APCs no longer sleek,
but pockmarked, patched-up, battle-scarred,
new shielding on their fuselage
to spread the blast of IEDs:
and elsewhere, naked, on bent knee,
under 'Prevention of Injury',
your High-Value Detainee,
Private Manning, cannot sleep.
At such things Lincoln once would weep,

but we're sophisticated now,
or post-postmodern, anyhow.
We know the Gulf War happened, since
we bulldozed bodies into pits.
We bag-and-tagged, we shock-and-awed,
we turkey-shot and pressed 'record',
shot our own Movies of the Week:
but God forbid the stuff should leak.
Now Private Manning has to pay
for snitching on the USA:

One nation, indivisible,
of free-market individuals
and corporations - which are people
(who are not created equal),
where goods and wealth will trickle down
to your senescent steel town,
and if they don't? If you're still poor,
speak to your friendly neighbourhood recruiter,
like Private Manning! Join the team!
Just don't let on that you're a queen,

or that, inside, you're just a girl -
don't wanna make the jarheads hurl!
And who could blame those good ol' boys
for dissaproving of said lifestyle choice?
When you're in country, killing ragheads,
you don't wanna think you sleep with faggots!
But it's a poor and unAmerican excuse
to blame sustained, malign abuse.
No: Private Manning chose to tell.
We were forced to give her Hell.

Now Christmas comes to one and all
on this side of the prison wall,
while some sweat in judicial fire,
cries for justice echoing higher,
right up to the White House Door,
where Barack says you broke the law
before your case is brought to trial.
He'll pardon turkeys with a smile,
but Private Manning suffers still,
sees no light from the City on the Hill.

America won't last forever:
nothing does this side of Heaven,
but backed-up drives and mirrored sites
will help the future scribes to write
of how a nation's shining dream
was finally broken at the seams
by Haliburton, Rove and Bush,
who made blood gush so oil would rush.
So Private Manning went to war
to buy the Haves a little more,

and found a happy hunting ground
for those who wanted flesh to pound,
faith to torture, bones to snap
and pretty girls and boys to rape.
Saw and told. Did what she must.
In Lamo Manning placed her trust:
Lamo, who claimed to be a man,
then sold his ass to Uncle Sam.
Now Private Manning's in a cell,
since Adrian Lamo chose to squeal,

and they say Manning's 'almost gone',
seventeen months denied the sun,
while Rove goes off on lecture tours
and Lamo's Langley's favoured whore,
and Barack speaks of hope and dreams
while hopeless, disenfranchised teens,
taught by pain not to give a damn,
enlist for battle with Iran,
while Private Manning sits and rots,
naked on an army cot.

Vaclav Havel died today,
but he was once, like Manning, caged,
because he wouldn't bend the knee
to those who steal our liberty.
Once he coped with secret police harrassers,
then skated through the leader's palace,
brought tyrants down, exposed a lie:
the same which bids us 'Occupy!'
Let all free voices now contend,
that Private Manning may see such an end.

                                                             *    *   *

I would like to get this poem on Youtube as a collaborative performance video, with people reading out a line each. If you'd like to add your voice, please comment or contact me via Facebook or Twitter.



.

I watched the news today, oh boy...

...and I saw a lot of nonsense about how two streets in London have been closed to traffic the better to facilitate the annual orgy of rampant consumerism with which we traditionally celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. All this on Buy Nothing Day too. Who says the arse-licking corporate media don't have a sense of irony?

Curious by its absence from the media, however, has been news of the ongoing student occupations of many major universities in protest at the coalition's assault on the right to higher education and their wider cuts agenda. The suppression of free speech can take many forms - one of them is ignorance and concentration on the trivial.

So against the silence of the media - who, as we've seen elsewhere on this blog, can be bothered to take an interest in the affairs of marginalised people when it suits them - I figured I might use this blog to link to all the occupations currently going on. Universities currently occupied are:

Newcastle

The University of West England, Bristol

Manchester Metropolitan University

The School of Oriental and African Studies

Edinburgh University

Sheffield University

Many other universities have been occupied, but students have either been evicted by riot police or forced out using siege tactics like denying them access to toilet facilities. A good list of all places where occupations have been in effect is the Solidaritree graphic on the Occupied Oxford site, and there's also a good list down the side of the Newcastle blog. And the UCL occupation, which is in many ways the flagship occupation now, goes from strength to strength, attracting messages and gestures of support from figures like Billy Bragg, Richard Herring and the mighty Noam Chomsky.

All these protests are peaceful, all these protests are ongoing and all are being carried out not by mobs but by students concerned about a government that is actively trying to destroy their future and that of their relatives. They are protesting against a society where corporations like Vodafone can get away with having their tax bills declared null and void, where the bankers who caused the crisis carry on paying each other massive bonuses with no reprisals from the government, where the young are invoked as a reason why 'we need to tackle the deficit now' - and are then made to pay for the deficit anyway as the government removes their right to education.

But because no-one has smashed a window, dropped a fire extinguisher or attacked a suspiciously-positioned police van, the media have refused to cover these ongoing gestures of resistance to kyriarchy. The revolution may well not be televised. But with Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere, it almost doesn't matter. The mainstream media refusing to cover a story isn't the kiss of death anymore. In a variation of the Streisand Effect, even suppression by ignorance doesn't make the story go away. All it does is make it more transparent whose interests the media really serves, hastening the media and the kyriarchal regime's decline into irrelevance.

The truth will out, always. And truth will be spoken to power, no matter how much those in power hate it. Power may try to suppress; power may try to ignore; power may try to punish, with riot police and other kinds of sanction: it doesn't matter. As I put it in my poem Class? War?, published in the Emergency Verse anthology - and which I used to finish my recent, well-received set at the inaugural WordJazz event - 'what we deserve, we will demand; you won't deny us.'

I finished that gig on Thursday by saying 'fight the power', which sounded a little odd in my girly little voice (I'm not exactly Zack de la Rocha, after all), but seemed like the only suitable way to finish in these turbulent times. A strange, jarring way for a poet who looks like a Primark Antony Hegarty , and identifies most strongly as a writer with an ancient Amherst poetess with one of history's most famous cases of the vapours, to end a set, but then, I suppose, these are strange times.

So...y'know, fight the power, yeah?

The Self-destruction of Nick Robinson

Further to yesterday's post comparing the operation of the Coalition to that of a wrestling promotion, it suddenly occurred to me that one of the Tories' pet journalists is beginning to display behaviour remarkably similar to that of one of the WWE's most troubled stars.

Don't believe me? Well, take a look at this classic example of former WWE champion the Ultimate Warrior on one of his trademark rampages around the backstage area.

Now, compare this video of former Young Conservative (and chief cheerleader in Dave Cameron's personal media Spirit Squad) Nick Robinson hulking out and destroying a peace protester's sign.

Now, alright, you may argue that, compared to the one-man rage-tsunami that is Warrior, Robinson's anger-gasm is kind of insipid and pointless, but that just shows you that the bland ecstasy induced by finally seeing your whey-faced poster-boy standing at the despatch box and repeatedly wittering on about the deficit will always be a poor substitute for the white-hot intensity brought on by years of steroid abuse and a rabid, sub-Nietzchean philosophy. The difference is one not of kind but of degree.

However, now that Robinson has opted to work the 'ranting scenery-destroyer' gimmick, he's going to have to try hard to stay in contention, especially now that political journalists with a much better workrate, such as Jo Coburn, are coming up the ranks by using the devious tactic of not allowing privilege-monger Michael Gove to mansplain all over them. I therefore suggest that, if Robinson wants to keep his spot, he shows up for his next piece-to-camera in neon face-paint, refers to everyone watching as 'all the little Robbiors out there', and repeatedly calls the anchor in the studio 'Mean Gene' regardless of whoever they may in fact be.

The baby-oil's in your court, Nick...

The Politics of the Heel Turn: or, Nasty Nick and the Kayfabe Coalition

2010 has been a strange year for British politics. Perhaps the biggest shock of all is the speed with which Nick Clegg went from being the British Obama to being, essentially, a stooge for a government which, as we learned from the Spending Review this week, wants to cut housing benefit for the under-35s, throw people off disability benefit left, right and centre, make life harder for women and old people, condemn young trans people to even more years in the closet than they put up with at the moment, deprive people in care homes of mobility aids, kick thousands of public sector workers out of their jobs and generally reduce Britain to a condition of neo-Dickensian misery (I suppose we should be thankful that Henry Mayhew's guide to the kind of world in which we'll all soon live has been reissued).

Many people were shocked by this change in Clegg's persona - none more so, I imagine, than the quartet of bright, breezy, cheerful young Lib Dem girls who I saw perform an impromptu 'I agree with Nick!' song and dance routine at Newcastle's Greys Monument in the week after the first televised election debate. I have to admit that I was less shocked than many people were by the speed with which Clegg dropped his principles at the promise of a ministerial limo, largely because, growing up in the 1990s, I had a ready-made model which I could apply to the situation. I've written before about my affection for the garish pesudosport that is professional wrestling. And in wrestling, the transformation in Clegg's character would be what's referred to as a heel-turn.

Profesional wrestling is a narrative form with a very odd attitude to continuity. Week-to-week continuity is important, but continuity in the longer term is subject to near-Stalinist levels of revision. The longer a character has been a heel or a face, the less chance there is that their previous status will be referred to. It is simply the case that they have always been 'one of the bad guys'. Through constant repetition, a narrative is generated that the fans buy into, and booing the dastardly villain becomes as easy as it was to cheer for them six months ago, when they were the crowd-pleasing hero.

Interestingly enough, the way the coalition have approached the economy has pretty much followed the same process by which professional wrestling creates its alternate reality. In much the same way as the WWE pretends that it was never called anything else, that Madusa Miceli wasn't the same person as Alundra Blayze, or that there exists a specific place called 'Parts Unknown' (whose inhabitants have an unusual fondness for face-paint and heavy metal; if it did exist, it sounds like it would actually be kind of cool), so we've been spoon-fed a series of egregious lies by the Coalition (whose name actually even sounds like a heel wrestling stable, albeit a slightly crap one; I'd have more respect for our new overlords if they took a leaf straight out of the WWE's book and started calling themselves the Corporate Ministry).

We've been told Labour left the country with an unbelievable deficit - in fact, before the recession, we had the 2nd lowest level of debt of any of the G7 countries.

We've been told that George Osborne's savage cuts to the benefits system are needed to wipe out '£5bn of benefit fraud'. In fact, benefit fraud costs only £1bn.

We've been told that desperate measures of the kind announced by Osborne are needed to save the economy. In fact, economists all over the world believe the Coalition is on the wrong course, and statistics show that these measures will plunge us ever deeper into recession.

There are more - many more - myths about the deficit, the cuts and the economy which the Coalition want us to swallow as uncritically as the marks at a wrestling match who will chant 'U-S-A!' during a match between a Candian face and a Mexican heel, but fortunately there are sites like Liberal Conspiracy, who have posted a handy myth-busting guide to the economic arguments here, and there are a host of blogs regularly deconstructing the lies told by the Tories' friends in the media. The point I want to make is that, while I enjoy suspending my disbelief if all it involves is a bunch of people jumping around in silly spandex outfits, when it comes to politics I would rather see a little more focus on what one of George Bush's aides (disparagingly) referred to as the 'reality-based community.'

Alternatively, if we are going to live in a world where our politicians treat us like a bunch of marks, then I demand that, during the next Prime Minister's Question Time, someone runs in and hits a hurricanrana on David Cameron. We may as well get some entertainment out of this bullshit.

Only Built for Hyper Linx (this joke TM & (c) pretty much whatever actual day http was invented)

Trying to keep the blog ticking over prior to next week's busy travelling, during which I will probably be Twitter only. So it's time for that standby of the blog world, the links roundup.

First, via Helen at Bird of Paradox, disturbing reports of Transphobic attacks being carried out at the 3rd European Transgender Council. A reminder that even in progressive places like Sweden, you still get cisfail. And of course I'm sure there's no connection between these racist, transphobic knuckle-draggers feeling emboldened to throw eggs and the recent increased profile of the far-right Sweden 'Democrats'. This is yet another reason why you have to oppose right-wing bollocks wherever you come across it, even - especially - when that right-wing bollocks is wearing a respectable suits and talking to you in a reasonable and patrician voice about how cuts are necessary and we're all in this together.

Or indeed putting together badly-written blogposts in a pathetic attempt to slander people who oppose your policies, as Tory MP and oxygen-thief without portfolio Nadine Dorries tried to do this week. Dorries' juvenile dig at disabled Tweeter Humphrey Cushion, which Dorries launched on her delightfully retro blog (designed in the style of a rubbish turn-of-the-millenium geocities page), helped along with an underhanded little assist from inexplicably-popular right-wing life-fail Paul 'I masturbate wearing a Guy Fawkes mask' Staines, has so far had the effect of...getting the Talented Ms Cushion a shedload more followers and causing Dorries to be pulled from tonight's Newsnight, presumably on the grounds that anyone who thinks that's a good blog design is clearly incapable of reasoned discussion and probably shouldn't be allowed near electrical equipment for reasons of health and safety. Fine work there by the Dorries/Staines tag team, who on this showing are the worst male/female combination since Dusty Rhodes and Sapphire. Great work, guys!

In happier news, it was lovely to see that my friend Angela Readman has had a story accepted by Metazen: read it, it's good. Then buy her books, because they're even better.

Finally, while trying to motivate myself to get on with preparations for the Cheap Date Poetry Tour, I youtubed John Adams' classic piece 'A Short Ride in a Fast machine', and uncovered a number of versions of it, most notably two intriguing animations, and a nice bit of speeded-up video of Paris. Interesting in particular to see how each of these different pieces handles the unusually slow part of the piece, that brief pause in which it gathers strength for its final assault and its final leap into musical hyperspace.

And speaking of brief pauses to gather strength, today has been mine. I probably shan't be in touch with you again until I manage some breathless blogging at the end of next week's exertions, so until then, goodbye my dears *curtsies, waves, accepts bouquets* Until then, mwah! x

We Will Never Forget (because the networks won't let us)

Another 9/11 anniversary, another deluge of programmes about the disaster that changed the world (that's 'changed the world' in the sense of 'caused the US government and radical Islam to follow geopolitical strategies they had already substantially committed themselves to' but let's let that pass).

What I find myself thinking about, though, is: were there these levels of hyper-commemoration around other major dates? During the second world war, there weren't massive commemorations in Britain of the declaration of war on the 3rd of September 1939.  During Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin incident wasn't marked with a slew of documentaries every year. Even other 'world-changing' events like the assassination of John F Kennedy weren't marked with special docs every year thereafter.

It might be argued that the hyper-commemoration of September 11 2001 is a result of the prevalence of 24-hour-rolling news and the internet. The internet made everyone feel a part of what was going on. I first found out about the attack on the World Trade Centre by checking the BBC website after rumours began going around the office. In this respect I was ahead of the traditional press: I later found out from an ex-girlfriend who studied journalism that the local paper she worked on had to find out about the events from the guy who ran the shop downstairs: their office had no internet connection. This was the old days, remember, you kids with your Twitter and your Facebook and your bloody Youtube. In our office we thought the Thorn Tree Forum on the Lonely Planet Website was crazy futuristic cyber-nonsense, for heaven's sake.

The rolling news both ensured that people heard about the initial attack, and that it was endlessly recycled through a search for talking heads to commentate, new footage of what happened, new graphics to explain what might happen next, contextual pieces about the history of Afghanistan, etc, etc. 9/11 was the first disaster of the new media age. The only comparably mediated event, the death of Princess Diana on 31 August 2001, occurred just prior to the mass-penetration of peoples' lives by the internet. By the time of September 11th 2001, pretty much everybody in the developed countries either was able to access the net by themselves, knew someone else who could, or had access to public internet facilities in a library or cyber-cafe (I remember going to London for a Diamanda Galas concert a little over a week after the attack: one of the first things I did, once I'd stowed my backpack at the fleabag hotel where I was staying, was to find an internet cafe in Covent Garden where I could grab a cup of bad coffee and find out whether Bush had decided to blow up the world while I was on the train); and big media, at least, armed with broadband at a time when the rest of us were still usually wrestling with dial-up connections, were well-placed to intercept, interpret and analyse the information streaming in from around the globe.

All that information, all that footage, all those interviews, all those graphics, and all the weird little facts and factoids and vile conspiracy theories which circulated after the event, were just waiting to be cannibalised and recontextured and consumed again in an endless orgy of mediophagy which began a year later and has continued every year since. We have reached a point, this year, where the older 9/11 documentaries are shown in the days leading up to the anniversary itself, because the schedules need to be kept clear for the new documentaries which will present yet another angle on the story.

The media loves a story about the media, and in a sense, the story of 9/11 is a story about the media: about the images of suffering, the stories of heroism, above all about that haunting image of the two towers, one smoking, one intact, and then the sudden, insidious shadow of the second plane sliding in, the explosion, and all hell breaking loose, in a moment which was described by many - showing the highly-mediated nature of the event - as like a scene from a disaster movie.

None of this detracts from the suffering of those involved. In fact, considering the degree to which their suffering and their stories were feasted on by the media should serve as a kick in the arse to make us think much more strongly about the trauma those people underwent. No matter how many documentaries we film, no matter how many new and exclusive interviews we see (tonight's star turns are Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld: perhaps next year we may get to see Dick Cheney, assuming he hasn't had yet another heart attack by then), we will not be able to understand what those who lost loved ones on that day went through.

You can never truly understand another person's grief. You can empathise with it, based on your own experience of loss; but you can never truly penetrate to the heart of another person's pain (and this goes double for all the self-styled Buddhas out there who see the suffering of others as an opportunity to show off their awesome listening skills and their grade 2 qualification in Neuro-Linguistic Programming). Grief is raw. Grief is red. Grief is unforgiving and unrelenting and it sneaks up on you when you least expect it and floors you like a concrete sucker punch. Everyone's grief, like everyone's love, like everyone's fingerprints, is unique.

And this is what worries me about the hyper-commemoration of 9/11. It lulls us into the belief that we can understand what people on that day went through. More than the original media storm, the retelling of these stories makes us believe that their stories are ours. They encourage us to identify with pain with which we have no right to identify. And that has very dangerous consequences.

There is something disturbing about a culture which still, almost a decade after a traumatic event, endlessly replays and reconstitutes that event for people who were involved in it only at third hand. The survivors of 9/11 have every right to tell their stories. And they deserve to have those stories recorded. But there is something disturbing about our appetite to hear those stories ourselves again and again, without setting them in their larger historical and political context. It's interesting that none of the 9/11 documentaries I've seen have asked the question of whether we have learned anything since the events of that day. Where are the documentaries on mainstream television about the other 9/11, for instance? When will a documentary move beyond the stories of heroism and consider how those who gave their lives were posthumously betrayed when their stories were co-opted into support of the Project for a New American Century and its neoconservative agenda?

Stories are important. But telling a story over and over without moving beyond it is obsessive behaviour. At some point you need to stop telling and start analysing. Maybe next year will be the 9/11 when we do that as a culture. Until then, it's something we can all do as individuals. And the more we do that, and the more of us who do do that, the less likely another 9/11 becomes. Peace is the way.

Major Misunderstanding Makes War on the Poor

A few months ago, I'm talking to a friend who works for a teaching union. Said friend tells me about an interesting call a friend of hers had received. The call was from the right-wing UK broadsheet the Daily Telegraph. At that time, the Telegraph - or the Torygraph, as many on the left call it - was riding high after exposing the MPs' expenses scandal, which - although many MPs from the opposition benches had also fiddled the system - inevitably hit the Labour government harder.

The man from the Telegraph had been asking about facility time allocations made by the Local Authority my union friend worked for. Facility time is something you may not know about. It's basically a system by which members of staff who are also union officials are able to work full-time on their union activities. The system is paid for by the unions, who pay to provide staff to cover for the officials while they go about their union work.

The system is paid for by the unions. Got that? The salaries of these workers - when they work in the public sector - are paid for by taxes - but the unions recompense the employers out of their own budgets. Facility time is paid for by the unions, to provide a vital service to union members, to ensure that practices and procedures at work are fair and conform to the correct legislation. Unions aren't bolshy, Citizen Smith operations - they're a vital check on employers, who make sure they treat their staff fairly. If you think a check like that isn't necessary, I would like to know which time tunnel you used to arrive here from the late middle ages, so I can kick you back down it to your world of feudal servitude.

Anyway. The Torygraph were snooping around trying to find out how much facility time various organisations were granting. My hunch was they planned to extend the MP's expenses furore to council level, giving their story a new angle and allowing them to run with it for a while longer. This would boost circulation and keep the Torygraph at the head of the news agenda - an odd position for it to occupy as, prior to the expenses scandal, the paper had pretty much been a joke, mocked for its fawning celebrity coverage and tendency to try and cover any story in such a way that it could be illustrated by a picture of a leggy upper class caucasian girl who (usually) would be surnamed Hurley or Goldsmith.

At the time I worked in a bookshop which sold newspapers, so was able to keep abreast of what the tabs and the broadsheets were covering without having to shell out any of my (limited) cash. I braced myself for a classic Telegraph 'retired colonel' piece all about bolshy unions and YOUR HARD-EARNED TAXES being used to pay for them and blah blah Tory fishcakes. And waited.

And waited. And waited.

And had actually almost forgotten about that little piece of info I'd been given until today, when the Torygraph suddenly decided to reveal all this information they'd been sitting on in this nasty litle article.

This delay in publishing is not an accident. In fact, it reveals something rather unnerving about the Coalition's agenda. We've been told that the public sector cuts being touted by the like of George Osborne are merely necessary because of the economic situation. We're told that these cuts have to be more swingeing than even the Tories promised before the election because it turns out the economy is in an even more parlous state than anybody realised. But as my little conversation six months ago reveals, the Telegraph have had this story in the bag for a looooong time, and they're only choosing to go with it now. Why is that?

It's because there is nothing necessary about these cuts. This is ideological. This, however much the Tories may deny it, is class war. Weakening the public sector is about making the vast bulk of ordinary people even more powerless to resist being placed on lower wages, being subject to discrimination by prejudiced employers, or being forced into poverty because their benefits have been cut. The unions, rightly, are campaigning to protect the public sector, and so protect the interests of ordinary people throughout the country. The Telegraph have sat on this story so they can use it as ammunition against the unions in this ideologically-driven war on the poor. And the fact that they sat on the information for six months shows that this war was being planned long before the election - at the very time that David Cameron was promising not to bring in swingeing public sector cuts.

The Telegraph will try to dress this up as a public interest investigation. But if that's really the case, why didn't they strike when the iron was hot - when the issue of expenses abuse was high on the agenda, and people were hungry for stories of corruption in high places? Because the Telegraph don't really care about the public - unless by 'public' you mean that tiny fraction of the body politic able to pay for a seat at one of David Cameron's dodgy dinner clubs. If the expenses scandal had been uncovered under this government, the Telegraph wouldn't have pursued it nearly as aggressively (indeed, the Telegraph have lagged far behind other broadsheets in covering metgate, a story with massive public interest implications which also happens to be massively damaging to the Tory party). The Torygraph deserves its nickname, because it's a propaganda organ of the Tory party - and their latest 'revelations' about facility time are disgusting, biased and sleazy - even for a propaganda rag. Frankly, I preferred the Telegraph when all its journalists were interested in looking up was Liz Hurley's skirt.

There Goes the Government

Just popping in quickly to let readers know that Emergency Verse, Alan Morrison's anthology of anti-coalition poetry, is now available to download for £2.99 from The Recusant poetry site. Among many other fantastic contributions from the likes of Andy Croft, Michaels Rosen & Horovitz, John O'Donoghue, Keith Armstrong, Tom Kelly and Anne Babson (who contributes my personal favourite piece in the book, 'Recitative: Then Shall the Eyes of the Blind'), Emergency Verse features my rabble-rousing little poem 'Class? War?', which I wrote in a massive fit of pique during the week Nick Clegg turned out to be a total Lando and the first pictures of the lily-white new cabinet began to appear in the press.

I do urge you to buy Emergency Verse, not just because I'm in it but because it's a damn fine anthology, and I wish it wasn't just an e-book but an actual paperback I could shove into peoples' hands with an injunction to read. There aren't many good things you can buy these days for just shy of three quid (even a pint of decent lager costs more): so why not shell out for 300+ pages of good, angry poetry?

'Between violence and silently seething, between my fist and my Polyanna flower...'

First things first. Check out the magnificent Laurie Penny's newest blog over at the equally magisterial New Statesman website.

Next, familiarise yourself with the points about status made in this Wired Article about the effects of stress on the human immune system and life expectancy (curtsy in the direction of Lilith von Fraumench, who first brought said story to my attention on Twitter.

Next, equip yourself with a copy of Mind Bombs by Garrick Alder, a book I heartily recommend for a variety of reasons, one of which is this gem of a fact based on a survey by Mary Shaw of Bristol University:

'The suicide rate is higher in deprived areas than in prosperous ones. For some inexplicable reason, the poor seem to suffer from fatal depression...Herefordshire reported only four suicides between 1991 and 1996, compared to 208 in Manchester during the same period.' 

The facts are in and the facts are these: kyriarchy kills. Wherever there are disparities in status, those inequalities make the people on the receiving end sicker, weaker, and fatally miserable.  They shorten lives either through the slow attrition of stress effects on the nervous and immune systems, or by making it more likely that someone will be pushed to the point where they see no other option but to kill themselves.

Conversely, more equal societies save lives - a fact amply demonstrated by The Spirit Level, a book which, by an astonishing coincidence, has came under sustained attack by right-wing demagogues just at the precise moment when a government that seems hell-bent on increasing inequality to Victorian levels is fucking the country without benefit of butter.

I'm going to say this: the only reason you could possibly have for opposing greater equality (and here I'm not talking merely about equality between economic classes but between abled and disabled people, people of different ethnicities, people of differing gender identities, sexualities, etc etc), given the fatal consequences of an unequal system, is that you're doing alright from it. Other people may be dying but hey, you're alright, Jack (a phrase which was often used by right-wing moralists to bash union members in the fifties - how bitterly amusing that modern exponents of the attitude are exactly the type who huffed and puffed when it was poorer people who were doing okay). And if that's your attitude, then I find you morally and, frankly, physically repugnant.

And I'm brutally aware that I do okay from this system. I'm white, I'm reasonably able-bodied (though mentally often crippled by low self-esteem, depression, social phobia, and a history of self-harm and eating disorders), and, while I might occassionally court harassment for my genderqueer antics, I run nothing like the kind of horiffic risks faced by trans women, or a lot of cis women for that matter. But I am trying, in my own way, to make a more equal system; and I'm not engaged in defending the tapestry of fuckery just because, from where I'm standing, it looks kinda pretty.

The kyriarchy kills. If you defend it, you have blood on your hands. And more and more people are realising that, and getting sick of suffering at your bloodstained fingers.

You know what happens next.

Bodies of Trust

I've been ill for the past two weeks, which is why my blogging has been minimal. The illness I've been dealing with was an infection. To be more specific, it was a gigantic boil on that area of my body which, in 'street' lingo is called 'the taint.' Said boil swelled up until it became painful for me to do, well, anything, really: I was given antibiotics and told to go away, then, when those antibiotics ran out, I was given more of the same, told the thing looked ready to burst but not yet ready to be surgically excised, and told to give it three days and, if the thing hadn't burst, to go to A&E and demand an excision.

It finally burst on Wednesday evening. And it was foul. Blood and pus and internal gunk completely destroyed my pants. It's been leaking out, at a steadily-slowing rate, since that night, though I've been minimising the effect on my underwear by inserting wadded-up kitchen roll between the draining infection and the cloth, and I've been taking extremely frequent showers to keep the area as clean as I can.

None of this is the worst of it, though. The worst bit was having to phone work and ring in sick. Because as soon as I had to do that - even though there was no way I was going to be able to get to work, even though the gunk was still staining my pants as I picked up the phone - I was a schoolkid again, telling the teacher I didn't feel too good and would like to be sent home, and afraid that I might be told not to be stupid and to go back to my seat. So there was this fear of being told I wasn't ill; but there was also this fear that if someone said I wasn't ill enough to stay off then maybe I wasn't, really. Despite all the evidence of my senses, the guilt over asking for time off because my body had failed and the fear that maybe I wasn't qualified to interpret those signals of failure had my stomach doing somersaults. They scarcely calmed down even after my team leader had told me that yes, they'd seen how much pain I was in on Wednesday, they understood, it was fine etc. Where does all this guilt and fear come from?

Well, to put it pretty bluntly - it's the kyriarchy, stupid. Or to be more specific, it goes back to an experience I'm sure most of us had as kids, which functions to keep us scared of and alienated from our bodies. Here's (one of) my version(s) of the experience, you probably have your own.

I'm at school, in a maths lesson. My stomach is feeling bad and I feel dizzy. I make my way, tentatively, to the front of the class and explain this to the teacher. 'Nonsense,' she barks, 'you're not ill at all. Sit down and get back to work.'

I'm sure that's happened to you countless times at school. It happened to me too. And sometimes, sure, I was trying it on. But there were a lot of occassions when I did feel ill, genuinely, but was told by an authority figure that I didn't. What effect does that have, cumulatively, over time? And what does this have to do with the kyriarchy?

Well, one of the ways the kyriarchy controls people is by estranging us from our bodies. If you want an example, consider how you probably felt reading the start of this blog. You probably felt a little disgusted, a little embarassed, and had a strong sense that these are not the kind of things we should be talking about. But why? Illness is a natural part of bodily experience, even illnesses which occur in 'personal' areas.  I'm not saying it's A-OK to have a giant pulsating pustule on your perineum (clearly it isn't, which is why I went to the doctor as soon as I found it, and why you should do the same should it happen to you), I'm just saying it falls within the normal gamut of human bodily experience.

The thing is, from an early age we're conditioned not to regard our bodies as normal or, rather, we aren't allowed the authority to define what is normal for our bodies. Right around the time I was learning that my maths teacher knew better than me what my state of health was, I was also going through puberty, and growing hairs on parts of my body which had previously been hairless. And I hated it. So I tried to fight back, at first by trying to cut the hairs back with scissors and, years later - when I looked old enough to smoke - burning the hairs away with a cigarette lighter. It never occurred to me that I could just get rid of the hair by, y'know, shaving - because shaving your body hair wasn't a man thing. Women shaved their legs, men didn't. Male bodies were hairy, womens' bodies were smooth. I surrendered my bodily autonomy to the gender police, and resigned myself to years of looking like George 'The Animal' Steele's gay cousin.

Of course around about the same time a lot of girls at school were facing up to exactly the opposite problem: the constant pressure to keep every inch of their bodies hair-free, and to stay thin, and to be desirable objects to the boys around them. All of us were learning that we didn't actually have any authority over our own bodies, that our experience of those bodies would be dictated by other people: teachers, fashion experts, diet gurus, athletes, magazine editors, TV stars and, perhaps most horribly of all, our own peers. When you feel like that, you can go a little crazy. I know I did. I developed anorexia in my late teens, and spent years struggling to develop a normal relationship with food. I can't help but wonder how many other people I was at school with went through similar issues. I knew a lot of people who were self-mutilating, in  one way or another. I can't speak for all those people, but I can speak for myself when I say that a lot of my problems stemmed from a feeling that the body I had, in some way, did not measure up to a thousand impossible standards.

The last paragraph of any piece like this is supposed to be the inspiring bit. This is supposed to be the bit about how I finally wrestled my bodily autonomy away from every other fucker who tried to limit it and became comfortable in my own skin. But, as my nervousness over speaking to my boss on the phone indicates, I'm not there yet. I'm getting there, though.

These days, I'm not anorexic. I'm also not as fat as I used to be either. I'm still quite fat, it's true; but I work out and I'm steadily getting fitter. I've lost a lot of weight in the course of the last year not through crash dieting, but by simply relating more normally to food, and to alcohol for that matter. I don't drink as much as I used to. And I don't think it's a coincidence that this new healthier lifestyle coincided with me deciding to finally do something about my body hair. Nowadays, I shave (and occassionally use creams) to get rid of the mat of black fur on my arms, chest and legs, and I feel better for it. I have accepted that I like to do a lot of other non-boy things with my appearance: I wear make-up (well, nail polish mainly, and occassionally mascara), I use feminine body language, I accessorise somewhat more freely than the average XY-person my age. I've accepted that while I don't necessarily want to have an actually female body, I like to be as femme as I can get away with, and I'm okay with that.

And yet...every single day, I still come up against the idea that I shouldn't do this. That I don't have a right to decide what to do with my body. I worry that people will think I look stupid, that people might be offended, that people might laugh. I worry that people will think that because I'm such a girl,  I automatically don't deserve to be taken seriously, that the vast reserves of knowledge and education I've accumulated will be rendered null-and-void because I choose to wear pink, flower-pattern arm-warmers rather than a tweed jacket. I worry that people will think that, just because I'm frivolous, they don't have to take me seriously. 

I worry. And then I do it anyway. Because I know that, even if I can't yet shut up the maths teacher in my head, every time I allow myself to deal with my body on my terms, her voice gets quieter and quieter and quieter...

And maybe one day, I won't hear that voice at all.

A little bit of politics

Yesterday was an interesting, and perhaps a little dispiriting, day, politically. We had the decision from a high court judge to ban BA strikers from exercising their democratic right to withdraw their labour (TRIGGER WARNING: about halfway down that site there's a picture of Willie Walsh's pug-ugly face); more worryingly still, there was the bitter irony that, on the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, when even police stations flew the rainbow banner, we had to put up with an administration that sees nothing wrong with employing someone as bigoted as Theresa May as Equalities Minister, no less, and appointing Philippa Stroud,  sometime nemesis of this blog and, you will recall, a woman who, in the year 2010, still believes in demonic possession, as an advisor. To reiterate: we now live under a government happy to take advice from someone who believes that evil wee beasties crawl into people and make them do naughty things because the divil tells 'em to, (Mrs Stroud has yet to comment on how these beasties gain entrance to people, but this writer reckons it must be through the arse).

A lot has been written about how the Tories are repealing some of the more repressive measures introduced by Labour during the suck-up-to-Bush era (and let's be honest, a lot of the Cleggeron's repeals are made much easier by the fact that the US has a much more liberal Commander-in-Chief now, so illiberal measures can be scrapped safe in the knowledge that it won't damage the Special Relationship), but I have to admit it: I'm afraid. I think it's a trick, a ruse. I worry that in maybe a few years, tops, if this government is still in power, we'll see their true colours. We'll see them try to rein in all the great social changes of the last thirteen years as they shamelessly court the Daily Mail tendency. They'll try to reintroduce Section 28, make it harder for gay couples to have kids, eliminate protections for trans people and, oh yeah, all that stuff about 'efficiency savings' in the NHS? Three guesses where that axe is gonna fall...

But then I read something like what Penny Red wrote the other day, and I think: FUCKING YESSSS. Cameron hasn't won the election, and if he and his trolls pick a fight with everyone who's danced out of the closet since Thatcher and her ilk were given the boot - indeed, with all the people who fought to smash down the closet door during Thatcher's reign - he won't, and can't win. Because all the LGBT people who can live more openly since Tony Blair came into power won't be shoved back into the darkness, and the vast, progressive majority of people in this country who aren't gay, bi, lesbian or trans, but maybe have friends or relatives who are, or who just notice how much nicer the country seems now we aren't, Jan Moir aside, picking on minorities so openly and viciously anymore, won't stand for it either.

So, as worrying as it is to witness days like yesterday, and the fears they bring: let them bloody try. Because we'll try harder, and we'll stop them. And in that spirit, here's a poem I posted on Write Out Loud yesterday in an attempt to deal with these concerns. Remember, folks: we fight 'em 'til we can't.

Bringing the war to the drawing room

I've read far too little of Alan Sillitoe's work - only really extracts from his two best-known books, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - but in an odd way the fact that I haven't read a lot of Sillitoe and yet remained aware of him, and of his impact, testifies to his success.

'Social realism' was a concept I battled with for a long time as a writer. I saw it as grubby and lacking in aspiration. I wanted to create work that was fantastic and unusual and not like the boring surroundings I grew up in. For me, escape was revolution, and I devoted my time to imagining a better, more fabulous and glamourous life that the one I was living. It's only as I've grown older, and came up against the mundane obstacles that try to stop us creating worlds fab enough to live in, that I've came to appreciate the importance of social realism as a genre, and the multiplicity intrinsic to it.

Social realism emerged as a challenge to an orthodoxy in literature which said working class lives were unimportant. Playwrights like Joe Orton were writing against the tradition of drawing-room farce, novelists like Sillitoe were competing with the work of people like Waugh and Powell, to make the point that working class lives and experience counted for more than just comic relief in stories where the main characters were always drawn from the wealthy elites. Social realism wasn't restrictive: it was about creating more space for voices which weren't heard. It's little wonder that the first such expressions were howls of rage and pain.

Drawing the attention of the privileged to the lives they overlook or mock, and writing stories which reaffirm the experiences of those lives for those who live them, is the kind of thing all writers should be doing, whether the privilege they write against is straight, cis, male, abled, rich or white. Especially given that for the first time in years here in the UK, the Tories, a party which, more than anything else, stands for keeping the plebs/queers/cripples/darkies in their place, is actually looking like a serious electoral threat. Sillitoe would hate to see David Cameron smarm his way into government, because allowing the country to once again be ruled by a bunch of braying arseholes from Eton would represent the betrayal of his writing, and the triumph of all he'd been writing against.

Except that the Tories, just like every other privileged group, can never really triumph as long as people who don't belong to their insular little circle-jerk keep writing, and fighting, and going on, whether we get our stories onto a national stage and bring the war into the drawing room, or huddle round the fire and tell our stories to our own. There will always be voices raised in opposition to the dominant narrative, and we should honour those people who stick their heads above the parapet to draw attention to the lives that it leaves out. Alan Sillitoe was one such person and, whoever wins on May 6th, there will be many, many other British writers walking down the trail he blazed.