Two hooks on wires shoot out of the Tasar into the target and about 500,000 volts gets rammed through them. It makes you convulse. It makes you fall over. It very, very rarely kills you, unlike any gun that could stop you as quickly. As a humane alternative to being shot by a 12-bore, which across a normal living room unlike on TV is something that is going to take your arm off, I’d choose being shot by a taser every single time. So far, so well, not good, but reacting to the level of threat, as the police spokesman said.
“When I joined in 1998, all we had was handcuffs and a truncheon. Now we go out in stab vests, with asps and CS gas. We’ve got to respond to the level of threat. That’s all this is. ‘Course, we’ve always had the long flight of concrete steps and the legal obligation to tell lies during the interview. And in court if we really have to, obviously. Don’t mind me asking but your car’s got an MoT, hasn’t it? Mind if I see the certificate?”
It may come as a surprise but the last bit’s not actually strictly true. He didn’t say that. Not on Radio 4 while it was on air, anyway.
But tooling up like this isn’t ‘responding to the level of threat.’ It wouldn’t have helped Lee Rigby, the all-too predictable mascot the police are wheeling out to support their militarisation. Lee Rigby was dead long before the police got there, but once the TERROR word has been used all discussion has to stop. By law very soon, I suspect.
If anything, the police are responding to a fear of being sued. By their own officers. The same logic applied to issuing stab vests. Are more policemen getting stabbed? You can be pretty sure the Daily Mail would tell you all about it if they were.
But is there a threat? Yes. There always has been. And as an employer, you have to make sure your employees don’t get hurt going to work if you know there’s a risk. You even have to make sure they don’t hurt themselves if they ignore what you told them to do to keep themselves safe.
An unlikely terror threat.
Once upon a time a Mr Thornton worked for Qualcast, who made lawnmowers, pouring molten steel to make the heavy rollers to make people’s lawns nice. As a foundry worker, Mr Thornton was a bit rufty-tufty. In fact more than that. He was a bit of an arse. Qualcast knew what happened when you pour molten metal on your feet and if you’re lucky you’ll still have a leg to stand on. As Mr Thornton found out in court. He refused point blank to wear the safety gear Qualcast had bought him. Predictably enough, one day he poured molten metal in the wrong place and injured himself hideously. So he sued Qualcast. And won. Duty of care. Known risk. Negligent to let him continue with dangerous practices. Should have sacked him. Pay up.
Which is exactly the situation the Police Federation, ACPO, the various constabularies and the Home Office find themselves in. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be able to use the ‘terrorism’ magic wand to justify what you’re doing. What really does hurt is the total inability of the BBC to do anything except parrot the Party line, without even a question. That’s a much bigger threat to everyone than the remote possibility of getting Tasered.
This happened to two different people I know, about a decade back. Yes, I know how old that makes me sound. Thank-you. I’d quite forgotten. But hey, there’s plenty of better people than me already dead, so what does that prove?
Anyway, back in Oslo and environs. This is how it goes. You go to Norway on business. You know they’re modest people not given to open displays of show and in-yer-face-lookit-moi-wedge flash, like Porsches and divers watches and all the rest of that Thatcherite leftover stuff. So you go to their offices in a quiet suit, with a tie.
When you get there you find, somewhat to your surprise, that everyone, but everyone is dressed in jumpers and boots. Because they’re also practical folk, who don’t get scared by a bit of snow. “Join us for dinner, please. We would like to see you” they say, because they’re also nice folk. Courteous.
You have a couple of hours before dinner so you go back to your hotel. There’s a tourist place just around the corner so you go there and get the most touristy, snow-flaky, reindeery jumper you can find, stopping just short of it having a huge red nose on the front of it.
Not quite the thing for dinner in Oslo. Really. Trust me.
You go to the restaurant. And you get the feeling you have on some dates, that something is going to go disastrously wrong for no reason you can put your finger on, but you know you’re not likely to be doing that now anyway.
The restaurant has a level of formality your grandparents would appreciate. They might be eating Bambi with a side-order of berries, but they still want silver service while they’re doing it. Ok. When in Oslo. And then your hosts arrive. And a part of you dies.
And then your hosts arrive. And a part of you dies.
Because they’ve all changed into business suits. Because they take dinner seriously. Because you’re their guest.
Hi, guys. What are cloudberries like then, anyway?
Years ago, when the world and I was young, Iain Banks wrote a book called Complicity. It was about a man who wrote a bit, and a woman he fancied who became an accountant, his half-hearted pursuit of her and his how shall we say, his taste for alternative avenues of enjoyment. I have nothing in common with him. Honest.
Anyway, good book. It was really about the 1980s and how everything changed and even though while it was changing you had the feeling everything was turning into something not very nice at all, damn but it felt good. A lot of people sold their souls for a pair of fake tortoiseshell Ray-bans and thought they’d come out ahead on the deal.
It was about how bankruptcy accounting was a growth area and how good the 4×4 and the boat that bought you felt. It was about stupid schedules that meant you had to be off your face to meet them and how that was just supposed to be part of the job, in that whole ‘lunch is for wimps’ BS mantra. It was about a man who after the Falklands and the stupid venture-capital rubbish shop he opened going mega decided he’d extract a personal revenge on the people who’d annoyed him, now that he could afford to. And it was about how journalism and castles in the air, or in the book a computer game, turned to crap.
I just about remember how a team of journalists brought down Richard Nixon. These days editorial resource is devoted to ‘reporting’ the latest eternal truths from reality TV shows that aren’t even vaguely real. Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends was supposed to be a spoof when it was written about in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, not an accurate meta-analysis. To save you the bother, just in case you’re a journalist, book that was turned into Bladerunner. (Character in book but not in film watches TV all day long. Chat show. Called Buster F & his F Fs, obvs.)
At breakfast time Buster interviews an actress about the film she’s about to make. At lunchtime Buster interviews her about the film she’s making. At what we used to call teatime Buster interviews her about the film she’s just made. There isn’t any film. There never was and never will be and nobody minds. Just try not to think of the actress as Kenny Everett’s Cupid Stunt though. It doesn’t help at all.
As an accurate summary of news gathering now and how it relates to what’s going on, that seems a fair enough analogy to me, after ‘beheading videos’ that categorically didn’t show anything of the sort. And if you think they do, watch them again. Then tell me at what point you see the beheading, at what point the guy it’s being done to even flinches, and exactly where eight pints of blood fountaining into the air is supposed to have gone, because it certainly isn’t in the video.
Vice magazine looked as if it was going to be different. Until today when it didn’t print this, where John Ronson chats to Adam Curtis. Obviously, you’re supposed to be hipNhappenin™ enough to know exactly who these two are, or why their coffee time drolleries are worth publishing to the universe and yours aren’t. They tell you at the end, if you get to the end.
Totally relevant.
At least they didn’t do those twee little face shots that every newspaper feels they have to have now, feigning amazement, indignation or trying to look beautiful-when-they-take-their-glasses-off-and-nobody-ever-told-them-but-they-knew-it-anyway/quirky-kooky-smart in the way most female newspaper writers go for.
Why do you believe journalism changed?
Cooed John. Or Adam. It doesn’t really matter which. Trust me. Well, we like writing about interesting people. Not dull old guys who wear ties and iron their shirts and have meetings. So not people like well, JFK then. He was quite interesting. Or Churchill. Fat drunk though he was, anyone who wears the same clothes for five years, lives in a house with more bedrooms than lots of streets and eats steak and kidney pudding by mashing it up in the bowl and pouring it into his mouth because
Graphic enough for journalists, apparently.
So not people like well, JFK then. He was quite interesting. Or Churchill. Fat drunk though he was, anyone who wears the same clothes for five years, lives in a house with more bedrooms than lots of streets and eats steak and kidney pudding by mashing it up in the bowl and pouring it into his mouth because he’s off his face counts as quite interesting in my book.
Except of course, journalists didn’t write about that at all. We’re expected to believe that we got here because George Bush senior and his son look a bit dull, even if Junior bears a disturbing physical similarity to Alfred E. Neuman.
The Adam and John show took a little time out from ‘as I was saying in my latest book dude, just like that great film you just did…” to come out with this:
It’s intimately related to what has happened to politics, because journalism and politics are so inextricably linked. Politicians…handed power to other institutions…..to finance, but also to computer and managerial systems.
They reinvented other parts of the world they thought they could control into incredibly simplistic fables of good versus evil. I think Tony Blair is the clearest example of this – a man who handed power in domestic policy making over to focus groups, and then decided to go and invade Iraq.
Well, bollocks. We’re supposed to beleive that for the first time ever, finance dictated politics. I mean, what a preposterous idea! That could never happen. And even more ludicrously, we’re being asked to accept with a straight face that focus groups called for the Iraq war.
Tony Blair was a spineless liar driven by expediency. He crawled around George Bush to bask in the reflected glory of a man whose own election was clouded with doubt. He lied, lied and lied again. And the media lapped it up and gave it to people as the truth. Weapons of mass destruction. 911. Al Q’uada in the Middle East. Missiles from Iraq in 30 minutes. Our Brave Boys. All of it total bullshit. All of it churned out as ‘journalism.’
But it doesn’t stop there.
And I think this process led journalism to face the same problem. They discovered that the new motors of power – finance and the technical systems that run it, algorithms that try and read the past to manage the future, managerial systems based on risk and “measured outcomes” – are not just obscure and boring. They are almost impossible to turn into gripping narratives. I mean, I find them a nightmare to make films about, because there is nothing visual, just people in modern offices doing keystrokes on computers.
I wonder how much ‘gripping narrative’ there was about hundreds of clarks sitting on high stools under gaslights, copying longhand before type-writers were invented, the people who underpinned Empire, global domination, the Industrial Revolution, the Golden Age of railways, or any and all of that. Or how visually appealing the Corn Laws were, or the endless committe meetings that preceded passing the Act that gave women the vote. About the same as visualising a modern office, I’d guess.
Even more fatuouosly, we’re supposed to believe that the failure of modern journalism in the sense of it finding things out and telling people about them isn’t just because it’s easier to repeat government press releases than go and do something that an MP might not like, nor even that you’re paid the same whether you do or not, no, none of that. The failure isn’t that journalism as say, represented by the BBC, the thing that used to be the lodestone of impartial, accurate reporting, went the way of highly visual frock coats years ago. That would be too simplistic for Adam and John. The failure is one of imagination, apparently. Because let’s face it, giving people boring old facts, like say, that there weren’t any WMDs or if there were it was because we sold them in the first place, what would be the point of that? It’s just no imaginative enough. Unlike Adam and John. Who managed to get through the entire mutual admiration piece without once saying that the problem with modern journalism is it isn’t about finding things out any more. And they certainly don’t use any phrases about it losing any balls it might once have had.
“Serco is an international service company that improves the quality and efficiency of essential services that matter to millions of people.”
That’s why they’re offering £16,271 to someone to do something they say is essential, in an efficient and quality-conscious way.
I’m not even going to bother saying maybe it’s me because it isn’t. It’s just the tidal wave of bullshit that pours out of people’s mouths these days. The flat refusal to see any difference at all between what you do and what you say. Or what you pay.
Last time I looked, assuming there are 48 working weeks in a year and 40 hours in a working week, there were 1,920 working hours per year.
£8.40 an hour. Less tax. You’re going to take home £270 per week. £14,019 per year. £1,168 per month. In London you might easily be paying £750 a month rent to share a two-bed flat in say, Kings Cross, unless you want to pay in fares what you save in rent.
Somehow if I was getting that it wouldn’t make me feel very essential. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s just something to put in the ad. Words, as the Tweedles Dum and Dee and Tony Blair all agreed, mean exactly what you want them to mean, no more and no less. All you have to do is establish who’s the master of them.
I had to get up early this morning for a belated visit to the dentist. The only slot I could get was 08:15, which meant getting up at seven, a quick shower, tea not coffee because it would take too long, two pieces of toast because making something would take too long, just let the dogs out instead of taking them for a walk and hope they don’t crap in next door’s garden (just kidding, I wouldn’t mind if they did that at all, if it was one neighbour in particular), bundle them into the car, stand there while the smaller one remembers how doors work, then start the car while you do the winter thing of putting the read window heater on, spraying the ice, scraping it off with the special glove scraper thing, wishing I’d filled up the screen washer then when I saw the outside temperature gauge saying -4.5 Centigrade realising it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway.
Got to the dentist on time and without incident this fantastic sunny morning, and happily the dentist episode was uneventful too. I was in the chair less than five minutes, after two years of not being there. No fillings to do. No enamel worn off. No gums falling out. No nothing. Not even any plaque that a minute’s polishing didn’t sort out. Thank-you Mr Bennett. I’m not going to get rich from you.
Last time I was there the dentist asked me to go and start eating sweets after he complained my teeth were 20 years younger than the rest of me. It wasn’t always like that. I nearly didn’t have any teeth at all.
My parents were disturbed. I had something wrong with my left eye and surgeons offered to correct it. The muscles on one side of the eye were stronger than on the other side. The eye hospital said if they cut the muscles a bit then the pull on that eye would balance up. I wouldn’t look wall-eyed when I was tired. My eye would focus more easily. That wasn’t enough for my father. I’ve seen his details on my birth certificate. He knew how to work a lathe. Obviously in his mind that qualified him to advise on eye surgery.
I was six and even then I was embarrassed hearing him sounding like a child badgering the surgeon. “But what if the scalpel (see, a technical word. My father loved doing that) slips? Hmm? What then?”
The surgeon pointed out that actually he’d done one or two of these before.
“But what if the scalpels slips?”
And on, until my father produced his trump card. “Let’s ask him!” Me. Aged six. Should I have an operation and go into hospital and my eye might be destroyed in a freak accident?
All my father was ever about was ‘look at me.’ We didn’t get the chance to do that a lot, admittedly, as he was a lying bigamist running two parallel families, but when he was there everyone had to look. But not too close, obviously.
The teeth thing I don’t remember so well. I didn’t know how to clean them properly when I was about ten. My father had left by then, taking up with a hairdresser from Andover, but that might have been just another lie like practically everything else he ever said. Because I didn’t clean my teeth much, maybe because I was so afraid of going to the dentist whose surgery waiting room I passed out in more than once, something horrible happened to my gums. On yet another trip to the hospital in Bath I was told I had to do two things unless I wanted all my adult teeth taken out within a foreseeable timeframe: Clean my teeth night and morning and gargle with alum.
Alum is stuff dug out of the ground. It’s a crystal and it’s antiseptic. I don’t know if it made any difference or not, but it tasted disgusting. It’s good stuff to put on pets’ wounds if they get in a fight, because they almost certainly won’t lick it off. But I cleaned my teeth and they didn’t get taken out.
The snag was I cleaned them too much. By the time I was in my twenties with the usual complement of fillings I could see my teeth weren’t like other people’s. The top front ones were a different colour, for a start. Another ten years went past before I got them crowned so they didn’t look black because I’d worn the enamel off from over-brushing.
It’s the gums. Even Alice Cooper had the same problem when the dentist told him his teeth were ok but the gums have to go. But not me. About fifteen yers back I got a proper dentist. He cost a fortune because he was in Wimpole Street but it was the first dentist I went to that didn’t frighten me.
It had just a few magazines and nice furniture and pretty girls who leaned a long way over me and pressed their breasts into the side of my head in a way that made me forget I was at the dentist at all. And it worked, except at £90 for 20 minutes I came to expect that, really, but times change along with my disposable income. Pausing only to push one of the girls out of the way the dentist told me something more valuable than peering down her shirt ever was, almost:
Get some dental sticks. Ram them between your teeth every other night. Your gums will bleed at first. By the end of a week, they won’t. Bacteria hate it. Then your teeth won’t fall out.
And it works. It saves a fortune on dentist bills. Admittedly, you don’t get to look down girls’s shirts every six months, or not for money anyway, but there are a lot of upsides. Like not having to go to the dentist at all. I do keep wondering whether people didn’t know this stuff back when, or they just weren’t telling. It seems pretty basic, really.
Obviously as soon as he was back from his fake photocall promoting freedom of speech by, for example, cozying up to medievalist feudal kings who have people beheaded in car parks or lashed for blogging, or Presidents of countries where they Photoshop women out of photos, and run down people for stealing chickens (on my kibbutz, since you ask. And they were proud of it) David Cameron called for freedom to be defended by spying on everyone. But don’t worry, apologists were quick to point out, he didn’t mean the government should have copies of everyone’s email.
No. That would be wholly wrong. Private companies should instead. Government is totally useless, except when it’s brilliant. I don’t know what meds Cameron is on at the moment, but the split personality thing isn’t getting any better by the sound of it.
Obviously jobbing off your emails to SERCO and the minimum wage zero-hours contract monkeys they usually employ in the interests of shareholder profit is going to be totally safe. After all, it wasn’t a private company that has repeatedly lost data sticks with people’s personal details on them, unlike the government and its branches, or sadly lost files that might have put a former Home Secretary in the nonces wing, or anything like that.
The snag is, there’s a good, quick, legal way around having the government finding out whose wife you’re spending perhaps a little too much time with, or whatever else you’re doing: don’t send it.
And if that sounds too obvious read on, because it works like this.
If you get a Yahoo account it’s free. It probably works with any other free email account, but I know it works with Yahoo. Because I do.
It’s just between us, ok?Write your email. “Your eyes are as limpid pools into whose very depths a man could dive and never surface, immersed in your beauty forever. And btw I found your watch. It was under my socks. Did he notice you didn’t have it on?” You know the kind of thing. Possibly. Anyway, save it as a draft. DO NOT SEND IT.
Now the clever bit. Tell the person you want to talk to the email account name and the password.
Then they can login and read the message in the draft folder.
It will never show up in any sent messages. It will never show up in anyone’s inbox. It will never show up as traffic anywhere. Because it’s never gone anywhere.
A week ago some people who worked in an office that produced some crudely drawn, frankly a bit rubbish cartoons were shot dead. A couple of days later everyone who’d done it was shot dead, which always hinders an investigation. One of the people who had officially ‘done it’, Hamyd Mourad, someone who was named by the police as having done it, was later released without charge after half his class said, some of them on Twitter, that he’d been sitting in school with them at the time, somewhere else.
Which begs the question how the police came up with his name. Luckily, they knew the name of one of the other people who got shot, because just like at the Twin Towers, where officially the fire from aviation spirit and some office chairs burned so hot that er, the building melted, like they do, except they don’t really, fingers crossed so it doesn’t count, one of the hijackers’ passports was found on top of the rubble.
Sorry? How could that not be possible? Obviously paper, which we know burns at Fahrenheit 451, doesn’t burn at the kind of temperatures you’d need to melt the metal girders holding a building up. Probably it was too hot to burn the paper or something. Are you some sort of conspiracy theorist?
Someone else was shot dead in France, as well. A policeman called Helric Fredou. Part of the investigation team on the cartoon murders, he met one of the victims’ families then went and shot himself, like you do as an experienced 45 year-old police investigator. Happens all the time. What’s interesting is the hysterical denials that appeared on Facebook when only foreign media, notably Russian, reported it, until the noble British free press decided that it was worth reporting after all.
Clearly something isn’t quite right with this story, though what it is you won’t ever find out. The CIA did some trying to find out stuff about ten years ago and they couldn’t find it out either.
At the time they were looking for Osama bin Laden and someone had an idea. Next time he switched on his satellite phone they could triangulate on where the signal was coming from and send a cruise missile there. Job done. They’d have to keep him on the line a bit, so maybe they could ring him up and tell him he’d won a prize or something, except as he was one of the world’s wealthy that probably wouldn’t work. Free breakdown insurance or a complementary boiler survey probably wouldn’t keep him on the phone either, but they could think of something, surely. That’s what the brightest and the best minds are for.
The only snag was they didn’t know his number so in an old-school Man From Uncle kind of way they went to the satellite phone company and demanded it.
It came as news to them. They didn’t actually have a Mr O. B. Laden in their phonebook, and oddly enough there wasn’t a billing address or entry that might likely be him at 4, The Caves, Tora Bora, Afghanistan either. The satellite phone company did have an idea though. They found a block of about 30 phones that transmitted from that part of the world.
Give us the numbers, said the CIA. Love to, said the satcom company. Would. But we can’t. Because you ordered them with blank numbers, specifically so that nobody had a record of them.
You read that right. The CIA gave Osama bin Laden a satellite phone, fixed it so it didn’t have a traceable number, then demanded the number. Freedom, liberty and democracy. Semper fi, Mac, as they say. Semper fi.
I’ve been to two interviews recently, one done by guys in their mid-thirties and one by someone in his fifties. The first two had interesting ideas about how to dress. All three had started their own business. The first two had a list of interview questions they’d printed off the internetwebness and didn’t really know what to do with them.The second one didn’t have the piece of paper.
To some extent, and I’ve been working on my tolerance skills, I don’t mind people not really knowing what they’re doing so long as that’s not what they primarily do every day. I’ve recruited and hired people in combination with someone else and it’s not something I like doing. Firing them less so, because you hope they’re going to come right and justify the investment you made in them. I’m not even talking about the hope that they’d work out, but the cold hard cash you spent on them, the company car you bought for them, the money from the house you sold to start this new part of the company, the part that turned into a pile of steaming crap because it was based on the total bullshit of the person standing there in front of you repeating their mantra that they’re ‘fully confident.’
And relax.
So I didn’t really mind the two younger guys running their thumb down the page and saying ‘what would people say were your worst points?’ I assumed they hadn’t phoned a random selection of exes, not least because the guy only had one sheet of A4 instead of the multiple volume calf-bound Book Club edition a couple of them compiled, each claiming theirs as the definitive text. Hi, babe. S.
And that one’s easy to deal with in an interview anyway, so long as you don’t mention the baby-oil handprints on the bed either side of someone different’s shoulders you only just noticed. Just keep them looking upwards,
“My worst points at work? Well, probably they’d say I work too hard, I’m too much of a perfectionist. Oh and I stay too long and get in too early as well. And I don’t take enough holiday when I’m owed it.”
Of course I said that. If someone’s going to ask standard questions then they deserve a standard answer.
But what are you supposed to say to someone who asks ‘if I said semiotics to you…?’
“No, thanks, I’ve just had some?”
“Is this a sign?”
Expecting bollocks like this I spent a tedious Tuesday reading about it. This stuff from Wikipedia is clear in comparison, even if it doesn’t have handy cartoons.
In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g. différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida’s literary self.
Or to put it another way, even before the University of Luton was invented, let alone txt spk, Derrida was a self-referential nouveau who made up words to suit himself.
Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.
Rorty. It used to be different.
Rorty used to be what good Brit bikes used to sound like, when someone cracked back the throttle on a Bonneville going down Bythesea Road, but times change.
So far as I understand it, which I’m prepared to say might not be completely, er, complete, it goes like this. What you think something denotes is altered by what happens next, infinitely.
Noam Chomsky wrote “I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I’ve been familiar with since virtually childhood”. Apparently liking Chomsky means you sympathise with Moslem fundamentalist terrorists if I read The Spectator right, so I’m stuck now.
What I should have done is pulled a note out of my wallet, said ‘this £20 is just a semiotic paradigm, isn’t it? Let’s see one of yours,’ pocketed both of them and walked to the station.
I didn’t, because I was still disconcerted from the previous statement, that they were looking for someone who spoke the languages ‘for our business in the BRIC countries; that’s Brazil, Russia, Indian and China.” Well thank-you. I thought it was Belgium, Rwanda, Iraq and Chile. A day you learn something is never a day wasted.
I didn’t actually know there was a language called Indian, nor Chinese, come to that, so I learned lots of things. Maybe when my third sentence in the interview was ‘have you read my CV?’ I should have done what these days I’m more inclined to do, the thing that really, in situations like this, I’m seeing less and less reason not to do.
Stand up. Put my coat on. Smile. And say thank-you for wasting my time.
I walked past my old flat on the way. At the end of the road there used to be a bombsite that got converted to a carpark and in the way of these things got colonised by stray cats, fed by the rufty-tufty huge blokes in big coats who ran the place. Things change. The cats were trapped, sterilised and released. The pub on the corner that used to have its windows put in because gay people used to go there, and not by them, has become a house. The cats car park is a Travelodge now. It’s not quite like that Max Boyce song about the pithead baths becoming a supermarket. But enough to make you tuck your scarf into your coat, smile, put your shoulders back and stride. Maybe it’s a sign.
I bought a book about ten years ago. Today I decided to read it and reminded myself why I hadn’t.
The value of a sign derives from the fact that it is different from adjacent and all other signs.
Ok, I can go with that. If there are two traffic lights at a road junction you (a) get irritated and (b) don’t pay as much attention to them because you keep looking from one to the other so when it goes green you don’t move off promptly but check the other one first. Got it.
Difference incorporates this but it also indicates that the value of a sign is not immediately present; so here I’m going to assume they mean that when someone at school walked through a road junction and his feet started sticking to the road because it turned out he was walking through a pool of blood from a car crash, the pool of blood isn’t going to be there all the time. See, I can follow this stuff.
..it’s value is deferred until the next sign in the syntagm modifies it. Take the syntagm from the English song Ten Green Bottles Ok. Let’s do that now.
Ten And Counting
As we read from left to right, the ‘ten’ gets transformed from “ten what?’ to the answer ‘ten green somethings.‘ But does it though? Isn’t that only true if you want it to be? It’s still ten, whether or not you define what it’s ten of, unless you’re actually saying ten doesn’t mean anything unless it’s something. Or something.
But anyway. ‘The answer to ‘ten green what?’ is then modified to ‘ten green bottles.’ Ok. Go on.
“There is, therefore, (once again)‘ oh mais oui, d’accord, encore une fois et tout ceci ‘ a retroactive construction of meaning. So far so good.’ I’m really not making this stuff up. And I didn’t put the once again and so far so good in. Because it really does strike me that the response to this bit is well, yes and no. If you want there to be. Not if you don’t, it seems to me. But let’s go on. If we do this at a run we might get through.
‘If we extend the syntagm to: Ten green bottles standing on a wall then further modifications take place. The ten items become items that are standing on the wall and the answer to ‘ten what?’ (the question I didn’t ask, you did, you said that, I didn’t say that) is deferred again.’
But only if you asked it, obviously. It’s just a song, you know?
‘By the time we get to the “wall” and clearly not Pink Floyd’s Wall, (OR IS IT!?!?!? Discuss, with reference to Levi-Strauss if not Levi-Schumann) having deferred our answer to what the bottles are standing on, we envisage the wall not as a bare one but as one with ten bottles standing on it.’
I like to think I’m not particularly dim, so let’s go with this for the moment. For me, if we’re doing walls, the song ends with no bottles standing on the wall, all ten having accidentally fallen. Makes sense? Stuff happens, what happens next is an ever rolling stream, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone, the Pink Paradise put up a parking lot. See, I said I could do this. I went to university, you know.
‘The sign ‘wall’ therefore bears the trace of previous terms in the syntagm.’ See? I said it first though.
‘(Namely ‘ten green bottles.”) Derrida.
Now, I don’t know Derrida. I’ve heard the name, but if this is what he said then he never actually listened to Ten Green Bottles. It doesn’t end with ten. It ends with none. There were no green bottles standing on the wall, Derrida. If the sign ‘wall’ bears the trace of previous terms in the syntagm, and for the sake of getting to the post office for a book of stamps and some fresh air I’ll accept it does, what I’m not going to accept is ‘namely’ the wrong number.
As I said. It could be me. Or oxygen starvation. Or an overwhelming sense of ‘what?’ followed by ‘how do you get paid to come up with this stuff?’ But maybe it’s me.
I’m at a bit of a disadvantage with multi-culturalism. We didn’t have any when I was at school. We had precisely two black kids in the whole village. I went to a little hundred-year-old Gothic Church of England faith school, as it would be called now. Our religious indoctrination was limited to a Canon coming to visit about every six months to inspect the Headmaster’s soul. He was in The War as people used to call it then, bought a Volkswagen Beetle he kept in a locked shed, thought I might do ok if I concentrated and wished my Maths would improve; that’s about all I know about his soul. That and prayers at the beginning of the day. I don’t think we had them at going home time. Maybe we did but our lack of multi-culturalism wasn’t really due to that. We just didn’t have foreign people around.
Except looking back, we did. The sisters, for example. They were about my age. They lived in a little cottage with their parents down a quiet lane and they didn’t have to do prayers at school if they didn’t want to. They had prayers on Friday at home and they had some candles in their window. We just had candles at Christmas mostly, but they got them every week. They were very pale and they had very dark hair and kept to themselves, Miriam and Rebecca. So did their parents, Mr and Mrs Haas. I don’t think I ever saw their parents out in our little Wiltshire village. That’s all anyone knew about them. And yes, those are their real names, deliberately, because I never heard anything bad about them in any way, shape or form. Someone said something bad had happened to the parents, something to do with the war, but that’s all anyone said about it, whatever it was.
We knew the motorcycle shop was called Difazio and the ice-cream man Antonio and a kid at school was called Gino in a very non-Northern Soul kind of way, but nobody ever told us about the Italian PoW camp there used to be, fifteen miles away. They didn’t tell us about the Polish refugee camp there’d been up on Keevil airfield either, where we raced our FSIEs and Suzuki mopeds once we’d get them through the perimeter hedge, which accounted for the Koslowskis and Kalinkas at school, too.
We did multiculturalism by not knowing how not to. Which is always easier when there’s no obvious difference such as the colour of someone’s skin. Because we certainly did have race-based prejudice at school. One summer, two kids in particular started their own race-hate campaign. Legitimised by the TV show Love Thy Neighbour, all of a sudden two little boys suddenly started talking about jungle bunnies, coons and wogs. One of them cited the ultimate reference of his father, who knew for the usual fact that people with darker skins were taking all the jobs, not least in Bowyers the pork pie factory. These two boys, one of whom went on the London School of Economics and had a very fanciable sister who had her own car (she was nice, too, and didn’t have much truck with the instant racism her brother spewed up every time he made a sentence in public) got their ready-made chip on their shoulder from their fathers and from the TV.
This week people have been shot in an office. We’re supposed to believe Islam, cartoons, Al Q’uaeda, ISIS, Saladin, always someone else does bad things. We don’t. It’s not bad when we invade other countries. It’s not bad when we drop bombs over a city at random and pretend no civilians got hurt, it’s not bad when we kill journalists, or attack a news organisation with missiles, the way Al Jazeera’s offices have been targetted twice by the USAF, or when we cut off water or electricity to entire cities, or blockade a country so hundreds of thousands of civilians die. That’s ok. They should have done what we said, because we are Right and they are Wrong. Always. We are rational and moderate and wise. Always. We have a reason for our regrettable actions. They are fanatics. Little more than savages. Always. You can tell, just by looking at them.
And in case you haven’t got the media message, watch the news. You can see what they’re like, these people who can magically chop off people’s heads without drawing blood, who can shoot someone in the head from ten feet away leaving their head looking exactly the same as it was before. We never lie. You can see that too, when we talk about city blocks falling down when they’re very obviously still standing, behind the person saying it.
