Twitter icon from the BUUF set by Mattahan (Paul Davey)1
This morning I deactivated my Twitter account.
I feel strange.
I have only been using it regularly for a couple of months. I set up my account in 2015, so that I could keep up with the rapid and exciting changes within the Labour Party. Then Facebook took over, and I largely ignored it. After deleting my Facebook account, I had a blessed period of no social media activity whatsoever. I think of this as a golden era. I might have been a little out of the loop about some things, but I was very productive. My work performance improved and I read more, and blogged with a little more depth.
Then, two months ago, (just two months!) our supreme leader2called a ‘snap’ general election. The ‘common sense’ view was that Labour would roll over and die. It didn’t work out that way. Like an awful lot of other people, I leapt into enthusiastic action, and my dormant Twitter account was a major tool of my involvement, although not the only tool. I set up a webpage within this site3, and blogged about the election campaign on the Island, and I leafleted and marched and went to rallies, and I had a whale of a time, and we achieved a result that no one had predicted.
However, it was not a victory, or a clear-cut loss. My intention had been to shut my Twitter account on the day the election result was announced, but I was hooked and it felt -feels- as though the battle goes on. I had gathered over sixty followers in under a month and I was enjoying the instant gratification of pontificating, congratulating and dismissing people on a public forum. I think, on the whole, I was in control of my tone. I certainly continued to gather followers and likes and retweets: all the psychic gratification of a system built around conditioned response, but I also was getting dragged in, in the way we love to see others dragged in, to the twitchy, snarly arse-sniffing of a social-media bubble.
Yesterday, I posted a comment about the odious, racist, right-wing ‘commentator’ Melanie Phillips4 and my sister took exception, suggesting that my use of the word ‘shrill’ was gendered. Now, I don’t regret lashing out at a privileged, fascist conspiracy-theorist. Indeed, I so dislike Phillips that I had trouble, for an hour or two, accepting that my sister had a point. Phillips uses a form of rich-people’s victimy hysteria as a cover for her selfish, spoilt vitriol, and I feel justified in despising her, but I was in danger of taking – indeed, I did take – the ugliness of my subject as an excuse for behaviour, or at least, language, that was as inconsiderate of decency as the poison spouted by the person I was attacking. As Phillips’ racist hatred has proved, words can have consequences.5 And, with social media, even the most inconsequential, trivial and apparently anonymous voice is only one careless tweet away from personal disaster.6
The medium, social media, had shaped my behaviour. It was too easy to publish – albeit to under a hundred people, directly – language of which, in the cold light of day, I was ashamed. Twitter didn’t even have Facebook’s one redeeming virtue, that it can facilitate discussion. On Twitter, you are constantly striving for the punchline: the killing blow, without going through the intermediate and potentially enriching process of an exchange of views. It had to end, and so I clicked deactivate, and am now back to being an isolated blogger, publishing my thoughts to the void, and to Diaspora, which, while it is free of Twitter and Facebook’s most obvious failings, cannot, in its restraint, provide quite the same interconnectedness.
However, if you are reading this and would like to keep up with my posts or even engage with me without signing up to this site, you might want to look at Diaspora. It uses a distributed model, and a hub can be set up on any server, which I would like to do some time. For now, I have joined a hub run by the developers, and have come across quite a few interesting people. It is not so compulsive, and it is a little quiet, but it is there.
Note from December 2021:I didn’t keep up my Diaspora account. It attracted the same extremes as the more famous social media. The medium is the message. I am working on notes for a long blog post on my reading into the ruination of the internet. Watch this blog.
Joseph Stiglitz provides a summary of just how bad the democratic collapse in America actually is in an article entitled “How to Survive the Trump Era”,1 on Project Syndicate.
The paragraph that leapt out at me says this:
…the importance of the rule of law, once an abstract concept to many Americans, has become concrete. Under the rule of law, if the government wants to prevent firms from outsourcing and offshoring, it enacts legislation and adopts regulations to create the appropriate incentives and discourage undesirable behavior. It does not bully or threaten particular firms or portray traumatized refugees as a security threat.
In a Guardian comment I posted when I could still stand to read that bloated, Blairite organ, I said that Obama’s main project as president was to re-establish the rule of law in American politics and, particularly, in relation to foreign and military policy. It is clear now that he failed in that task: Guantanamo remains open, NATO, acting as an organ of the American military-industrial complex, is pushing confrontation wherever its whims incline it, and the Calvinist hardcore of the Pentagon have adapted with equanimity to the election of a fascist.
Now, it appears that the contempt for its own laws that has bedevilled America from its Military-industrial complex has slipped into its broader domestic economy. The rot has spread, as it was always likely to.
David Bromwich has a fascinating article in the LRB3 in which he identifies the attitude that underlies Trump’s contempt for both law and politics. It is not that he has any ideological hatred for the institutions of civil democracy, but that he sees them as of minimal importance: what matters is freedom for the rich to do what they will.
In a radio interview in 2015, he recalled his visit to Russia in 2013, in an unsuccessful attempt to close a deal on apartment complexes. ‘I was with the top-level people,’ he said, ‘both oligarchs and generals, and top of the government people … I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary.’ Though it may seem a tiny slip, one notices the distinction between top-level people and the top people in government. Oligarchs and generals come first and rank highest in Trump’s estimation; top government people are worth knowing, but secondary. Trump likes the relationship of money to power in Russia – and specifically of financial power to government authority – more than he admires anything special about Putin, whom he has never met and about whom he knows little. Evidence of a vaguer affinity can be tracked in his appointment of four billionaires and three generals to senior advisory or cabinet positions: in his US government the ‘top-level people’ will be identical with the ‘top of the government people’.
I have not posted much about the president, or, really, put my thoughts in order about him. It is time I did. I, like anyone who wishes to believe that the death eaters will not win, must come to some understanding of what it is we face and what we must do save our civilisation. Assuming that you are awake enough to understand that Facebook, Twitter and even WordPress will not unsettle the power of the neo-fascist new dawn, you, like me, will be trying to make sense of this collapsing era, and trying to decide what issues you care enough about to engage with and to uphold, as all decency comes under energetic, hateful attack.
The first shock, as both Stiglitz and Bromwich say, has now passed. It is time to shake off despair and begin to construct some sort of plan, as individuals, and as members of our polities.
I can’t say that I have any clear answers, but I am beginning to try. I can recommend a look at the short list of behaviours written by Timothy Snyder to which I linked back in December.4 It has practical and moral suggestions: the need for courage being primary amongst them. I have also been moved by Bromwhich’s article. Chiming with Snyder’s eighth lesson, Believe in Truth, he explains Trump’s almost magical gift for lies thus:
In Leviathan Hobbes said that what we call the ‘deliberation’ of the will is nothing but ‘the last appetite, or aversion, immediately adhering to’ an action. Whatever the general truth of the analysis, Trump’s process of thought works like that. If Obama often seemed an image of deliberation without appetite, Trump has always been the reverse. For him, there is no time to linger: from the first thought to the first motion is a matter of seconds; the last aversion or appetite triggers the jump to the deed. And if along the way he speaks false words? Well, words are of limited consequence. What people want is a spectacle; they will attend to what you do, not what you say; and to the extent that words themselves are a spectacle, they add to the show. The great thing about words, Trump believes, is that they are disposable.
It is pointless to study what Trump says day-by-day. It is necessary to take a step back and see which of his manic ejaculations he repeats; which become themes. Here in Britain, it is necessary to see which are taken up by the people who would ape him: not UKIP, the hapless farce who will not do anything other than represent the dying wishes of the greediest, most selfish generation in modern British history, but the real carriers of reactive nationalism; the political parties who see as ‘political realism’ the need to ape populist nationalism in order to ‘achieve power’. Nationalism as it now manifests has been a long time in the making, and it would make a good doctoral thesis to study it. Murdoch and his imitators (the deeply odious, surprisingly influential pornographer, Richard Desmond5 being chief among them) have played a seminal part, but it is not entirely, I think, a creation of a malign press. As Bromwhich says:
Neoliberals have spent a quarter of a century arranging the ingredients for the catastrophe. Lenin said of Stalin that ‘this cook will give us peppery dishes,’ and for all the talk of nation-building, democracy promotion, multiculturalism and tribal recognition, globalisation à la Nato has been a peppery dish. There were several chefs involved: Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their exemplar Tony Blair. They all wanted to convert the populace to an enlightened internationalism, but along the way they forgot to talk us out of nationalism. The military operations that dismantled Yugoslavia and overthrew the undemocratic governments of those artificial entities Iraq and Libya were meant to be an earnest of the goodwill of the global improvers. The trouble is that wars tend to reinforce nationalism, and unnecessary wars, where the fighting is drawn out and the result chaotic, leave people doubtful and suspicious.
Sometime last year, before the Democratic primaries were over, but when it looked as though Hillary had swung it, I wrote on my (now deleted) Facebook account, “I do not want Hillary Clinton to be president.” There is a narrative, amongst the voices who see the past thirty years of ‘left(ish)’ or ‘progressive’ politics as fundamentally unproblematic, in both this country and in the States, that opposition to a continuation of Blairite, Clintonesque pseudo-opposition to the neo-liberal, capitalist rise of oligarchy is rooted in the sort of intolerance against which they feel they are the only bastion. As Rebecca Solnit sees it,6 Hillary Clinton lost because of misogyny; not because of her record as a major architect of the Obama administration’s embedding of commercialised, continuous war,7 or her championing of support for tyrants, or her husband’s disastrous capitulation to capital,8 or the fact that, in office, she and her husband made themselves super-rich.
This narrative, – that only the established politics could safeguard against the new nationalism, and that any voice, from left or right, who dares to criticise the social-democratic surrender to the super-rich is not only responsible for Brexit, the rise of Trump and the declining popularity of the X-factor, but also motivated by sexism, anti-semitism and a love of conflict, – is, patently, a lie. However, I know people, good people, who are convinced of it. They feel that the Blair government wasn’t so bad really, despite ASBOs, PFIs, Iraq, and the final enthronement of Murdoch as king of Britain, because it kept their property values rising for a decade and kept conflict nice and far away,9 mostly.10 What I think they love about the New Labour era is that it was sleek, ‘professional’ and, to their eyes, cool. That aspect of Blairism largely passed me by: I saw New Labour as a coup against messy, committed politics by the sort of people who couldn’t ever manage cool, however much they valued it. Personally, I like my politicians resolutely uncool. They tend not to believe they can get away with things.
So, what to do? I so want to just tend my garden, and be good at my job, and write my novel, brew my beer, love my wife, but this is a time for those of us who care to try to make an impact. I attended a Labour Party meeting last week, for the first time in a while, and will be campaigning for our council candidates, in the hope that, at local level at least, some opposition to the ongoing monstrosity of austerity economics funding billionaire parasitism of our economy can be constructed. I learnt there that the council funding for my job had been cancelled the night before: we bring in some national funding, from a government quango, but how long that will last under a rabid Tory government is debatable.
Meanwhile, I see the support for the people who are my clients being run into the ground, by death eaters who are not even really trying to make excuses for their corruption any more. The Isle of Wight Council has been ceded to a Tory/UKIP coalition of the most miserable, unimaginative graspingness: their only solution to our misery is to build an industrial estate: an opportunity, no doubt, for bribes and in-dealing that mirrors the orgy of corruption enjoyed at national level between politicians and privatisation parasites like Branson, Murdoch and the Prime Minister’s husband.
The rule must be, do not despair. Do what you can. It is hard, but it must be done.
If Hollywood has one problem that robs it of greatness more than any other, it is this: it thinks it knows what every story must contain, and it doesn’t adapt its approach from one project to another.
Amanda had wanted to see Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them when it came out, but Christmas was a busy time and, somehow, we never got round to it. The DVD has started to appear in second hand racks, so last night we watched it and, despite its abundance of charm, its lovely acting and its scattered glimpses of J K Rowling’s inventive genius, it was, overall, a bit of a routine Hollywood bore.
Its main failing is that it is trying to be two things; one original, charming and interesting, and the other a rehash of every blockbuster GCI action slog of the past ten years. The introductory story, about Newt Scamander arriving in New York on a mission to free a Thunderbird back into its native environment, losing various endearing creatures from his magical suitcase, and scrambling around the city in the company of a group of sidekicks to recover the beasts, is a lovely, lovely film. While this thread is played out, it is funny, original, visually and narratively coherent and fun. However, forced into this delightful framework is another story, about a baddy manipulating abused orphans to oppress muggles, and this element, for many reasons, is a crushing role-play of rote Hollywood tedium.
There is some nod to the established Harry Potter backstory to try to give the “battle” some context, but the characters are mainly new, apart from a reveal at the end which I’d seen coming from the first time my attention wandered, half way through the film. For this reason, it really needed to focus on a tight, controlled group. Either the bad guys had to be established early and with the same manic focus that Rowling put into Voldemort-as-legend in Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, or they would never really be anything but a distraction from the good stuff. In lieu of her considered characterisation, there is an opening montage of newspaper headlines talking about Grindelwald, and then Colin Farrell has to try to build threat from ambiguous brooding. His patsy, Credence Barebone, (a classic Rowling name) has an even more thankless task: the actor, Ezra Miller, puts more than his share of acting workshop commitment into playing an abused, repressed, psychotic teenager, but his role clashes horribly with the main story and just underlines the fact that this sub-plot doesn’t belong in this film.
Of course, it’s there in order to justify a big, over-long, smash-the-city-up CGI borefest, that dominates the last hour of this meandering chore. The first time a wall collapses in gloriously imagined detail, down to individual brick and plaster mote, it is a marvellous effect. By the end, I was recognising the routine, and wondering which f-key they’d assigned it on the compositor.
So, to the good stuff. Eddy Redmaine is, to my eyes, a startlingly, almost beautifully ugly man, and he is one of the old Etonians, or Harovians, or whatever, who have made a nice living playing sexually ambivalent English posh tossers for Hollywood, but, despite his position of privilege, he can either act quite well or takes good direction. He filled the role just enough, and hammed just enough, to give his character life in Rowling’s Dickensian comic-grotesque mien, without reducing him to a turn. The greatest performance for me, though, is Dan Fogler, as Jacob Kowalski, the comic side kick (ie, Ron Weasley). The funniest sequence in the movie is the scene where Jacob, dressed in some sort of sporting armour, is chased across Central Park by an amorous erumpunt, a cross between a giant rhinoceros and a puffer fish. In this scene, CGI are used as they are meant to be used; to create a gloriously funny scenario of impossibility and follow it through in as natural a way as possible. Fogel’s comic gifts in this sequence are as effective as any slapstick great: his reaction shots rival Keaton, and his peril is enhanced by the social awkwardness of a big man trying to outrun unwelcome female attention.
Equally engaging is Queenie Goldstein, played by the amazing Alison Sudol, who is Jacob’s crush. She’s a proper Noo Yoik “doll” character: naive but wise, loving and instantly devoted to her unlikely crush. She seduces him with strudel, in another triumphant special effects sequence in which the acting shines, the characters endear and the CGI serves. Thinking back on it, I am struck again by what a tragedy it is that this film was bogged down by an unnecessary second plot.
Scamander’s love interest, and partner/rival, is Queenie’s sister, the disgraced auror, Tina, played by Katherine Waterston. I can’t put my finger on what she lacked in the film: she was interesting, an assured performer, and had a good part, but I think her character was just stretched too thin. It is Tina who is the link between the two plots-Newt really didn’t need to be involved in the Grindewald plot at all, and was squeezed into it as a sort of external consultant. Through Tina, we learn a little about the political tensions within the American wizarding world, and the pressures upon it, and her place within the American version of the Ministry of Magic, MACUSA, would have been quite justified without the violent subplot.
Finally, there are the creatures. They are a success and, had the war story been abandoned, could have carried another half hour of fun. The best is the niffler, a thieving, errant duck-billed raccoon, who has a gift for evading capture and a deadpan slapstick manner that is a joy to watch. He (she?) is probably the real star of the caper element of the movie, although the clingy (“He has attachment issues”) bowtruckle who lives in Newt’s pocket and is, at one point, traded to Ron Perlman’s gangster cameo, develops his own level of stardom. The thunderbird is beautiful, but its plot theme is somewhat squandered in the great “climax”, and both the demiguse and the occamy are, in different ways, gorgeous.
This is my favourite of the cards we’ve seen this year so far. It’s an Oxfam one, so both funny and worthy: a true Danceswithcats image.
It’s been a strange sort of year and I am, like many people, unsettled and anxious about the future. However, I am a Christian, and, as such, I take the Christmas message as a promise of hope.
All will be well.
May God’s peace and love be with you. Happy Christmas.
Despite the best efforts of Richard Brody to deflate the experience,1 I love Rogue One.2 We’ve just got home, and I was surprised by how much time had passed: I hadn’t realised it was such a long film, so caught up was I by the perfect plotting, the heart-achingly redolent alien landscapes and pitch-perfect acting. Quite what Brody was on when he watched it, I’m not sure, but his off-target review had the happy effect of affording me that amazing, “This is actually rather wonderful!” feeling about ten minutes into the film: the opposite of a spoiler; an accidental enhancer in which I saw the strengths of a superb Hollywood movie through a scepticism built on a critic’s failure to understand what he was watching.
Brody’s greatest failing is shared by a number of reviewers of popular cinema: he treats the film as a valueless text, a technical exercise whose success or failure rests on its performance as spectacle and nothing more. He ignores the extent to which Rogue One is a political text, with its subject the injustice of military empires. I expect more of Brody but should not, really, be too surprised. The New Yorker is, after all, American. It does a good job of being metropolitan in an American way, but, to a non-American, it is loaded with that sense of American parochialism: the presumption that all that is worth considering is enclosed by two mighty oceans, and the rest of the world is just settings for American psycho-dramas. Part of George Lucas’ strength as an artist of relevance is his ability to see beyond the quasi-religious restrictions of his nationality and to criticise its fundamental failings: its arrogance, its brutality, its assumption of apartness and specialness.
I have, in fact, been a fan of Richard Brody for several years. He writes beautifully, and he is particularly strong at describing the visual experience of film; his technical appreciation leads his consideration of narrative, character and tone. I am a story-led viewer, so his contrasting perception has enriched my enjoyment of a number of films I might not otherwise have considered watching. He has, on occasion, taught me to see. However, I am not that interested in Hollywood spectacle films, so have tended to read his reviews of them uncritically, and without seeing the films. His avoidance of ideological criticism had not hit me.
Reading his review of Rogue One, and linking through to his other arguments about Star Wars,3 came as a bit of a surprise. I hadn’t understood the extent to which he is restricted by what I can only think of as ideological blinders: he loves the self-referential tendencies of Hollywood, but he is not prepared to make much of an ideological move outside the walls of the form.
So, when a film’s topic is cinema, as is the case with many ‘serious’ Hollywood films, he is happy to consider the philosophical and ideological implications of the movie. Early this year, for example, both he and I loved Hail, Caesar,4 and the following passage of his review entirely chimed with my enjoyment of that fine movie:
The American religion of Hollywood is also, in the Coens’ antic view, the essence of American power…of military might versus what ultimately will become known as soft power…The story of “Hail, Caesar!” is the story of that worship of secular images, but…the Coen brothers offer brilliantly ironic parallels between religious belief…and the realms of Hollywood.
American cinema is a power, in other words; a global ideological force that doesn’t so much argue the case for American dominance as bludgeon the world with its assumption of that power. What Cody sees in the Coen Brothers’ view of Hollywood is knowingness: a clear satirical understanding of the role Hollywood plays in maintaining and repackaging a view of the ultimate goodness, validity and entitlement of right wing, white America. What he does not acknowledge in cinema is rebellion: the possibility that deviance from that view can possibly have any artistic validity.
And, in that blindness, he is entirely ‘on message’, as far as Hollywood’s soft power is concerned. Think of the way in which Hollywood has co-opted science fiction – a radically subversive literary genre in the nineteen fifties, sixties and seventies – and turned it into a cosy re-enactment of the militarist right wing mythos of American capitalism. Tom Cruise, the ultimate screen anti-presence, appears every half-decade in some ironed-out mega-epic6 that hoovers up all the latest devices of science fiction’s inventiveness and presses them into the service of a Nietzschean self-worship non-story in which the white man is always the victim and always the narrative focus, beautiful women (white, black, asian-doesn’t matter: they’re just devices) are the plot key, and daddy’s approval saves the world. Through the appropriation of its creativity, science fiction’s power to undermine and criticise the dominant culture’s ‘reality’ is rendered impotent, confused, and pathetically excluded, rather than vital, telling and radically marginal.
I have always thought of Hollywood as a pretty monolithic ideological structure and considered making distinctions within its output a bit of a fool’s game, but I am becoming less sure of that.7 White America is strangely blind to its own privilege and shamefully quiet about its abuses but that is not to say that it is as uniformly supportive of them as we might believe.8 Now, I’m not planning to defend Star Wars or George Lucas as beacons of racial justice, but I do believe that there is a serious argument to be made for his branch of Hollywood creativity representing something of a dissidence against the hegemony of the kind of self-focussed orthodoxy represented by his friend and contemporary, Spielberg. In John Baxter’s biography of Lucas, there is this passage which addresses the politics of what are now the grand seniors of Hollywood, but were, then, the enfants terrible.
Later, Schrader (screenwriter and director Paul Schrader) would bemoan the split between Lucas and Spielberg on one side, and Scorcese, Milius, and Coppola on the other, which started to open around 1975. “We came up full of piss and vinegar and politicization,” he said, “and we really felt that we were going to create a new brand of movies. Now, if you look at the film-makers of my generation – Walter Hill, Phil Kaufman, John Milius, George Lucas, Spielberg – by and large you see a kind of middle-age creeping in, a kind of establishment attitude and a lack of eagerness to take risks and challenge and upset.
Baxter John, George Lucas: An Autobiography, London, HarperCollins 1999, p191
Perhaps, in 1999, and for a really mainstream auteur like Spielberg, middle age and middle-of-the-road liberal consensus politics is an inescapable comfort zone. I know he has championed civil rights, but he also lobotomised the motivation of the two main characters in The Colour Purple, straightening them out and making their primary motivation daddy issues, instead of their condition as female victims of masculine oppression. Because of that, I haven’t watched Amistad, but, having read Roger Ebert’s review,9 I may put it on my viewing list. I don’t hate Spielberg; Schindler’s List moved me, although I am aware of its critics,10 but I suspect him of loving war as spectacle, and he more often disappoints than inspires.
“I dislike deeply ‘Schindler’s List,’ for many reasons,” he said. The Spielberg film is “much more easy to see than ‘Shoah,’ it is very sentimental.”
“It’s false,” he added, because it offers an uplifting ending. He also questioned the value of Mr. Spielberg’s underwriting of 105,000 hours of videotaped testimonies from concentration camp survivors and others in 56 countries, asking, “Who will see this?”
Lucas, though less vaunted as an artist, gave birth to a saga in which the primary act of heroism is resistance against a militarist tyranny. He has continued to develop the theme of the moral primacy of democracy and justice over commercial power and mechanised military oppression through two Bush administrations, the establishment of the American permanent state of war and the drift into remote terror-war embraced by Obama. Now, as America faces her darkest hour of self-harm, he has handed over the reins to the corporate icon of optimistic capitalism and, instead of changing course, it has given us the most lucid hymn of praise to resisting the militarist tyrant yet, complete with ideological splits, and a rebellion Taliban who are not the bad guys.
In short, although Hollywood is an engine of ideological propaganda, it is also an arena of competition to shape that ideology, and I think Cody has dismissed the extent to which the ideology represented in the Star Wars saga deviates from the mainstream voice of Hollywood, and of capitalist establishment politics.
Let’s address Star Wars’ ethical weaknesses first. There were no black faces in the first Star Wars film, now known as Episode IV: A New Hope. If you take the Star Wars universe as a representation of America (and you should), it is a purely white America. That is not, in itself, an act of dishonesty. Lucas is a white American and in the film, he “…effectively created his childhood on film: a world of stern fathers, loving but distant mothers, and wayward but essentially good natured boys” (Baxter). Most white Americans do not knowany blackAmericans nowadays, and that was doubly true in the mid 1970s. Suburban white America was his milieu and, therefore, the subject of his art.
There’s also the issue that Star Wars, despite being a magnificent work of the imagination, is not really the product of Lucas’ imagination so much as it is a skilful blend of other people’s original ideas. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, was deeply wounded by Star Wars and considered a suit. Staunch defender of David Lynch’s awful adaptation of Dune that he was, he noted:
David had trouble with the fact that Star Wars used up so much of Dune. We found sixteen points of identity between my novel and Star Wars. That is not to say this was other than coincidence, even though we figured the odds against coincidence and produced a number larger than the number of stars in the universe.
I am terribly sorry for Herbert on this topic. He was shafted by circumstances. He wrote a novel of overwhelming power that turned space opera from the ‘juvenile’ sub branch of SF into its most vital and powerful element, and then saw his serious work overtaken by an exploitative repurposing into what he must have seen as a juvenile parody, as well as moneyed plagiarism. There are reasons for this, not least of which was that he failed to keep up the quality of the first book in the sequels. The second13 and third14books, whilst at least coherent, are both quite boring to read, lacking the vividness and sensory power of the original, but I recently read the fourth15 and it is, frankly, ridiculous. Added to these woes is the fact that Dune almost made a cinematic masterpiece: Jodorowsky’s Dune16 has to be among the greatest of all unmade films. I have seen three of Jodorowsky’s movies, and he is a visual director in search of a story, tied too literally to Jungian hero quests to ever quite bring his amazing cinematic surrealism to full narrative life. The combination of that powerful novel, with its own surrealist undercurrents well tamed by Herbert’s extraordinary plotting and characterisation, and Jodorowsky’s joyous visual imagination, would have made a wonderful adaptation that could have left Star Wars to the kids, balancing out its influence.
However, it was not to be and we are left with Star Wars as the highpoint of space opera political parables, at least on screen. And, whatever my inner twelve-year-old might argue, Star Wars is far from perfect. For me, the most mysterious and involving of the films is The Empire Strikes Back, which Lucas still regards as an artistic failure, but I think Return of the Jedi is a tedious, disjointed film in which the interesting elements-Luke’s battle with his father/nemesis and Vader’s redemption in the Force’s triumph over the Dark Side, are overwhelmed by the kiddy-friendly action story from which it is divorced.
The Empire Strikes Back is about preparedness and the internal jihad: Luke is making himself worthy for the fight against the Dark Side’s temptations. It’s difficult to remember now the impact that the line, “No, I am your father”, had on us at the time. Before then, Vader was not a character, but a figure: evil incarnate, without face or motivation beyond the exercise of power. With that one line, he became greater, deeper, easier to stare at and consider. His motivation became a question worth pondering, and the Dark Side, as a choice of allegiance, became a much more accessible and frightening idea. A lot of plot devices took on lives of their own in that film, just as those of us who were on the cusp of our teens when we saw the first film, were reaching the age where existential questions were beginning to interest us.
In Return of the Jedi, Luke’s, Vader’s and the Emperor’s confrontation is too similar to the original duel/debate between Luke and Vader in The Empire Strikes Back; visually, rhythmically, emotionally and thematically. Disastrously, the first trilogy’s great climax is a bit of a bore, and the reconciliation between Luke and Vader, for me, failed to rise above standard Hollywood daddy issues, fascinating as seeing Vader’s face was. It was just a little too trite. I was glad when it was all over, even though the final shot of the cast smiling into the camera was just foul, like a betrayal of the operatic depth of the story to which the series had aspired, as if the director had realised that he had failed to reach the emotional tone he was aiming for and had put in an apologetic, “it’s only a kids’ film” shoulder-shrug image to cover his embarrassment.
Nevertheless, underlying the story, there was a constant, and that was the political environment: the ‘cartoon’ morality of which the critics make much dismissive noise was not a good-and-evil tale of obedient certainty, but a clear imperative to disobey tyranny. The baddies are not outsiders or criminal: they are the soldiers, the policemen, the leaders and lawmakers, and it is the rebellion who are breaking laws, hiding in paramilitary training camps, defying established authority.
And this brings me to Rogue One. It has many threads, and it is told as a montage of encounters with people who have found different routes to the same conclusion: that they are unable to live in peace with the established legal authority of their society. This ties in, in some sequences, with a long standing (and ethically and historically dubious) American myth: that of the defiant frontiersman, for whom all authority is to be evaded, if not defied. However, in the character of Saw Garrera, we have a rare depiction of politically engaged, ethical resistance, struggling with the consequences of the choice to defy injustice. In Forest Whitaker’s exceptional performance, I recognised what I have been struggling to understand in the faces of the dead men and women who have thrown themselves against the American empire over the past two decades, knowing that they could hope for nothing but death and torture as a result, but determined, nevertheless, to cause harm to the power that has oppressed their political freedoms, mocked their faiths, shattered their societies, and murdered their loved ones.
Is Gerrera a mujahadeen? The scenes of the ambush of an Imperial convoy in the streets of his planet’s capital city are too redolent of Afghanistan, Iraq or Palestine for anyone but the densest of viewers to not make the connection. There’s the sand, the close-packed sandstone buildings, the basic armaments of the resistance and the mechanised brutishness and arrogance of the powerful military. We are so used to seeing such sequences shot as triumphalist homages to heroic military sacrifice (Black Hawk Down, anyone?) that it took me a moment to realise what I was seeing: the stormtroopers have left behind their nazi-parrallel roots and have taken on the roles of the American Marine, the Israeli snatch squad; the British squaddy, exercising their power in the service of a resource-raping capitalist occupation.
And this, I think, must be why Richard Cody dare not look too closely at the politics of Star Wars, and is obliged to reduce it to a technical exercise and seek to diminish its power as popular text. Consider the absolutely required reverence for the soldier in Western capitalism: even nominally anti-establishment voices, such as American comedians, cannot speak of soldiers without a hushed genuflection to the ideas of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘service’. It is difficult to raise the question of how closely linked war is to profit in Western discourse:17 lawyers who were prosecuting British soldiers for rape and torture in Iraq18 (be warned: this is video of some uniformed shits giving their souls to Satan) have just been stitched up for alleged corruption and the inquiry19 shut down:20 the murderers have got away with it and it’s not a big news item. It is so much easier to simply go with the mainstream narrative: to pretend that soldiers are noble servants, making some sort of heroic sacrifice, rather than well-paid mercenaries in the service of an unjust power. When art, however obliquely, addresses such a massive and hegemonic silence of complicity, the best defence against its power is to simply belittle it, and that is how Richard Brody has bottled his duty.
The weather today has been dull and mild, after a week of bright and sharply cold winter days. It has been a joy to have proper winter weather, with low sun and crisp, frost-covered grass.
Brocks Copse Road, with frost on the field
On Monday, I went out early to pick up some paperwork and got to Ryde by about nine. Usually I would have had the trailer on the bike, and have been dragging files and a laptop and a change of clothes, but I didn’t need it for this errand, and the bike felt as though it weighed nothing, freed from its usual burden. It was a good ride over, in glorious weather, cold enough to cause my hands to ache when I got into the warm of the Learning Centre. I collected my papers, did a bit of photocopying, had a cup of tea and headed home.
For some reason, I chose The Sundays for my headphones: Blind.1 It’s a cheesey album, but it holds memories for me, and I was able to let my thoughts drift back in time as I climbed from the valley below the back of Ryde up to the top of Havenstreet: a journey of about two miles that switchbacks over two steep hills. By the time I reached Firestone Copse, I was riding smoothly and comfortably, enjoying the cycling rather than enduring the journey as I so often do when I cycle for work, when I’m struggling with the weight of the trailer or against the clock. As I passed a gate at the head of a path into the woods, I turned, almost without thought, and rode into the Copse.
Firestone Copse in winter
I don’t recall the last time I rode a bike simply for the fun of it, without being on my way somewhere, with a purpose. I think it would have been about two summers ago, when I took part in a couple of organised events. Since then, my bike has been transport. I’ve enjoyed it, often, but only incidentally.
Well, this Monday, I rode for pleasure. I was probably only in the woods for twenty minutes or half an hour at the most, but it was timeless. I followed that first path until I reached a branch, and kept turning off onto smaller and less well-defined paths, until I was riding down a leafed-over avenue that barely qualified as a track. I remembered a ride in Firestone Copse with a mate, when I had first bought a reasonably capable mountain bike, eight or nine years ago. That had been the Hardrock that I had named Millenium Falcon. It was stolen from our front yard two years ago and I still miss it. Back then, when it was a relatively new toy, Kev had shown me the tracks down to Wooton Creek, at the bottom of the Copse, where a track winds along the shore, in and out of the trees. Now, lost, but in a good way, I supposed that if I kept heading downhill, I’d reach the Creek.
The trail along the creek shore at the bottom of Firestone Copse. Monday 5th December 2016
And, soon enough, I did. Too soon, in fact. It has been a long while since I rode a winding woodland path downhill, jumping fallen branches and skipping over roots and winding around trees and stumps. I didn’t hare it down, but let the hill take me and just kicked the occasional peddle turn to get me over small rises and obstructions. But it’s not that big a wood when you’re headed downhill, and even with all the twists and turns, I had reached the Creek after about ten minutes.
The tide was out, and Wooton Creek, as the name implies, is tidal, so it was largely mudflats. I didn’t see any animals, and the only birds were a flock of gulls resting on the water way out in the creek, but the potential of life was everywhere: I could almost hear the heartbeats, scurrying and squeaks of the life hidden in the landscape. The picture above is of the trail I remember cycling with Kev: It was Summer then, but another beautiful sunny day, and the ground, instead of being covered in fallen brown leaves, shone green with the light through a full Summer canopy. I’m not sure that it is any less beautiful in mid winter, though.
I laid my bike down, got my phone out, and took some photos.
Wooton Creek at low tide
The battery on my bluetooth headphones had died on the ride, and the old, slightly tired pop music had been silenced. I had returned from my memories of another time in my life to the beautiful present; the living peace of the sounds of a wood. Far off, around the bend in this last picture, is an hotel, and beyond that, less than a kilometre away, the main Ryde to Newport Road. I strained to hear the traffic, but all sound was deadened by the blanket of peace that trees lay over the earth.
At one time, I would have smoked a cigarette here; I don’t do that any more, and though I miss it, I was glad to be able to cycle hard away from the shore and up, back through the Copse, without the aches and rattles of a smoker’s chest. Lost, I found a little bit of myself, and when I regained the road, I was travelling with pleasure, for the first time in a while, less tired than I have felt for months, and a fraction lighter of heart.
I just deleted my Facebook page. I am no longer feeding the beast.1 Woohoo!
(Yeah, I know that link recommends not deleting your account but being a ‘positive influence’ within it. Seems a bit of a sell out to me, but he is a tech blogger, so…2)
Facebook is parasitic bullshit3, and its users are its victims4.
I sent contact details to those people who I don’t see in real life, but if I missed you, sorry. Send me a message via the contact page in the menu above.
My sister started it, which is ironic, as she is now about as vegetarian as Hannibal Lecter, but when we were teenagers she went vegetarian, and then, after leaving home and joining a squatter community in London, vegan. I mocked her fairly heavily about it, but I was a bullying brother anyway, and would have mocked her for something.
Me at 17. The conceited buffoon I’ve been running from for more than thirty years.
Then, after I’d grown up a bit, although not much, I met a girl who was out of my league, really, but who put up with me for the better part of two years, and she was veggie. She was very beautiful but a little facile and I discovered a couple of years ago that my family couldn’t stand her; not even my sister, who is hot on women being loyal to one another. I suppose she was a little smug, but I was a little up my own arse, so that may have been what made it work, at least for a while.
Anyway, vegetarianism wasn’t an alien thing to me by the time I reached my twenties. It just didn’t seem to be for me. I was wedded to the idea of being normal, or, at least, of not being freakish, or something. It didn’t hurt that my mother is an excellent cook who makes really lovely stews and roasts and meat gravies, and I suppose you love what you know.
One experience had undermined my commitment to carnivorous gluttony though, piercing even my self-satisfaction, and that was my first full time job. For three months in the summer of 1985, a couple of years before I got together with my trophy girlfriend or was challenged by her vegetarianism, I worked for a company called Sappa Chicks, who ‘produced’ day old chicks for the egg and meat market, and assisted farmers in the rearing and exploitation of them. They had a ‘hatchery’ in Fornham All Saints, and, that summer, every weekday morning, I drove my first car, a Mark 1 Escort that had cost me £400, out there at four o’clock to meet the ‘field staff’ vans, in which we’d travel round East Anglia. Our job was to supply the bulk labour for the farms, for most of whom chicken rearing was a sideline. They fed, watered and, nominally, cleaned out the birds, and we went in for the purposes of vaccinating them, debeaking, loading them onto transport for slaughter, or transferring them into battery cages from litter huts: tens of thousands of the company’s living product at a time.
The farmers weren’t paid all that well to farm the chickens, so they didn’t put too much effort in. The litter often didn’t get changed, and sick birds were left among the, well, healthy would be too strong a word, but the as-yet-undiseased. So, after a couple of weeks of use, the litter huts were usually pretty appalling.
I hated being in the chicken huts. In the litter ones, the litter the birds were supposed to live on soon became a rubbery shit cement. If it wasn’t cleaned out at least once in the month or so that the birds spent in there before being moved to the battery cages, two diseases would break out: cocksy and staffs. Cocksy was an infection of the crop; staffs, an infection of the bones and joints. Even back then, thirty years ago, they were being bred and fed to gain weight far too fast for their strength, so staffs would floor them if they got it. That left them sitting on the shit cement, exposed to the dirt and the cold of the floor; pathetically resigned but still horrified by their predicament, craning their necks, on the lookout for predators they couldn’t escape. It usually fell to us to weed out these poorly ones and ring their necks.
I passed the test of doing my first killing, and earned the respect of my more experienced colleagues. They weren’t hardened men: they understood that some people weren’t suited to that sort of work, so when I did take a diseased, filthy, ruined bird in my arm, handling it gently and kindly, right up to the moment when I grabbed its legs in one hand, looped two fingers of my other hand round its head, and pulled and twisted, they said I’d done a good job, even though, as it started to flutter and convulse in its death trauma, I dropped it to the floor in disgust.
Compared to the battery huts, however, the litter huts were places of pleasant calm. Nothing really can describe the repulsive collision of utility and spite that the design of a battery hut represents. They are long buildings, and they are full of shit dust, so that you can’t see from one end to the other. The racks of cages go from a foot or so off the floor to above head height and the alleys between them are a little wider than a man and a half. We’d either be taking the birds out, six to a hand, to carry them to the door to be vaccinated, or we’d be carting them to a waiting lorry to be taken for slaughter when they’d reached the end of their useful lives as egg layers.
Our presence, and the panic of the birds we were mishandling, and their wailing, heightened to a more frantic coda by their renewed terror and agony, roused the rest of the birds from the clucking torpor of their accustomed level of hell to a refreshed and sharpened panic. We would try to not panic the birds; to work as quietly as we could, but within five minutes of our starting in a hut, the cacophony would be deafening and heart breaking. We were not supposed to carry a bird by a single leg, but it allowed us to carry more at a time, and time is money, so… As I staggered along one of the runs, with my shoulders aching from the weight of the terrified creatures jerking in my grip and trying to raise their heads to peck at the hand that was pressing their already wire-cage-mangled legs in a new type of joint-crushing torment, it dawned on me that I must lead a good life, because I knew now the form my personal hell would take.
They do scream, by the way. It’s clucking, obviously, because that is the vocal physiology they have. But clucking is expressive. If you pet a hen, and treat it gently, and sit it in warm sun, it will make contented sounds. If you torture it, as it was my job to do, it screams.
I’m ashamed to say that I might have got used to it, if I’d stayed. I’m equally ashamed of the fact that the reason I left wasn’t a crisis of morality, but the utter outrage, as it seemed to me, of starting work at 4 am. I was seventeen and, daily glimpses of damnation aside, in some ways, it wasn’t a bad job. Working in a gang of men is a good experience for a young, shallow, uncertain teenager. In several good ways, it did ‘toughen me up’ a little. On the down side, it scarred my soul with a conscience debt I will never outlive, and it confirmed me as a committed smoker, but it also gave me the opportunity to visit and work with some communities who wouldn’t have welcomed me in any other circumstances: farm families on the Norfolk and Cambridgeshire fens whose lifestyle wasn’t completely changed from the way their grandparents had lived at the end of the nineteenth century.
I particularly remember a South African immigrant farmer, who’d come to Cambridgeshire to a take over the farm he’d inherited from his great aunt: she’d been a widow whose husband had died on National Service in the fifties. His wife brought us tea in a delicate tea service on a plate silver tray, and they treated us as honoured guests. His huts were immaculate, and his chickens were disease-free, but he only reared them; he wasn’t interested in egg huts. His pride was the thousand acres he was rotating between wheat, barley and sugar beet, making more money in a year than he had made in two decades on the veldt.
Insensitive and self-absorbed as I was, I did give up eating chicken as a result of that job. The men prided themselves on not being put off it by the work conditions, and I steeled myself to continue eating fowl, despite the faint scent of shit that would rise in my memory whenever my mother had cooked chicken, but a particular event finally tipped me over the edge and I had, apologetically, to decline any more of it. We had a colleague; an irritating weed of a young man, who had that indifference to being liked that is the hallmark of the really weird. His most annoying habit, among many, was that he could not take a pull of a cigarette without blowing elaborate smoke rings, with a look of considered connoisseurship that belied his vapidity. He was also incapable of saying anything without an edge of spite. He was, in his immaturity, a fully polished facsimile of whoever he treated as a male role model: I always imagined it was a creepy step dad who had ‘taken him under his wing’, and in partnership with whom he spent his evenings unsubtly humiliating the barmaid of his village pub, before rolling home to torment his mum. The contrast between the appearance of this physically underdeveloped apparition and the affected tone of wisdom and experience in which he couched his venom was creepy and alienating. He was tolerated but also despised. We closed ranks out of a collective disgust.
One day, when we had stopped for lunch, he pulled out from a large Tupperware box a giant turkey drumstick, and blithely dug into it. I didn’t say anything, but our charge-hand, Steve, who had struggled with his irritation with the weed for weeks, muttered “filthy bastard”, and I was glad of it, because it meant I wasn’t being over-sensitive.
This was in ‘85, remember, so, given that I gave up chicken and all other fowl as a result of that incident, that means that my first self-imposed food taboo is now thirty-one years old.
I left that job to work in a hamburger shop, a Wimpy, of the style that aped McDonalds. My soul debt to tortured animals was mounting. It had many of the same virtues as the chicken job: it exposed me to people I wouldn’t otherwise have met and the hours were better, but the pay was truly pathetic and I didn’t know how to get out of the trap of hourly paid work that really only paid pocket money. Eventually, to my parents’ well controlled glee, I decided I needed A levels. I went back to school, met my girlfriend, had a great couple of years then had my heart broken, and went to university.
I embraced university life, joint, pose and barrel. I was still a naive, impressionable young man, even though I was a couple of years older than many of my contemporaries, who had come up straight from school, without the intervening years of work. I spent the first year stoned on excellent opiated Afghan hashish, called gold seal, that had a Muslim crescent moon stamped in gold leaf on one side of the pound weight blocks that my dealer bought, and the Soviet hammer and sickle on the other. I threw myself into new social arenas, became an utter fantasist who told outrageous lies about myself (a tendency I had always had but which escaped its inhibitions once I had moved away from my small town) and, thank god, listened enough to other people to have some of my certainties challenged.
It was a time of transition and disruption: a strange time, but a beautiful one. Nelson Mandela was released that winter and the Berlin Wall came down soon afterwards and, for a while, anything seemed possible. In that time of collapsing certainties, I think I benefited from a sense of possibility that flickered around the world for a little while.
Most of those certainties I have since readopted: my university flirtation with atheism never felt natural to me, for instance, and I returned to faith even before I had graduated, at least in my head, if not in practice. However, my sense that meat eating was a normal behaviour and that vegetarianism was some sort of affectation that came from being a show off was pretty comprehensively demolished for me in one conversation with a friend early in my first year. So, I unlearned big chunks of my conservative conditioning, and I learnt idealism, and its most concrete expression, for me, was giving up meat.
I have never regretted it; never. Any health benefits were masked by my smoking and my alarming alcohol intake, which I only got under some sort of control when I became a taxi driver, about a decade ago, but I have been lucky with my health anyway. And, for me, health has never been the point. I have learnt to cook as a non-meat eater and I do not think that I have missed out on anything, other than that slightly sour, sugared-shit smell that meat eaters sometimes get when they sweat. It took me years to pin it down, but it is the smell of a red-meat eater, with the long bowel of a mainly herbivorous digestive system clogged up with the rotting remains of compacted pig and cow flesh.
As for the fabled ‘sacrifice’ of bacon: maybe, for about a year, I might have sometimes wished for bacon. Getting a cup of tea at a burger van first thing in the morning after a night of clubbing and there not being anything on offer that I would want to put near my mouth was inconvenient, but it had more to do with the fact that I had woken up to just how wretched the food I had been used to eating was, rather than a longing for forbidden fruit. Now, the smell of bacon reminds me of fly-tipped nappies. Watching someone ingest that horror is like watching an addict shoot up. It is mildly disgusting, but it is their choice. I do not judge, but I certainly don’t lust after it.
And that sense of fairness and moderation may be, I think, why I took another twenty-five years to make the full leap of logic. I accepted the validity of the argument for veganism fairly early on, but I resisted the personal implication of it, again, I think, out of a desire to avoid being ‘extreme’, and because, subconsciously, I bought the messages that are pushed relentlessly, in opposition to reality, that say meat and dairy (‘liquid meat’) are essential to health. Now, after a year of having an entirely plant-based diet, I can’t believe how stupid I was to think that veganism would be too difficult, or to have been swayed by the fear-mongering propaganda of the meat industry that pushes the obviously absurd lie that humans must have meat or their balls will drop off.
Science, direct experience and bald common sense are all clear on how harmful the eating of meat in anything but the smallest and most infrequent quantities is, and, when you think for more than an instant about what milk really is, and how not designed for human consumption cattle milk is, that propaganda’s success becomes pretty impressive. It takes a certain creative genius and dogged persistence to construct so radical a distortion of reality and to make the consumption of animal products seem normal, necessary and sane, rather than the social and cultural sickness it really is.
Meeting Amanda has been the turning point in my life. Sometime, I will write a full appreciation of my luck in that regard. Her being veggie and in fact, having been vegetarian for longer than me, was a definite thumbs up sign in the beginning of our relationship. She is very involved in her health and so, when I watched Cowspiracy1 a year or so back, and told her that I thought it was time to try veganism out, she was really cool about it. It turned out she had been considering it for ages, but thought I would resist it.
So, we gave it a month, planning menus and getting all worked up about protein, iron and rare B vitamins, as you’re supposed to when you’ve been subject to pro-meat propaganda all your life. Then we began to relax about it all, eat the things we like and hope for the best, which is what people who eat ‘normally’ do. I love stews and gravies; Amanda loves pasta, and spinachy, nutty, nutmeggy things and we both love yeast extract on toast and porridge in the morning and we’ve both got used to UHT soya milk in our tea, which really isn’t so bad. In fact, on the occasions when I have accepted a cup of tea with dairy milk, out of politeness, I have found it too oily, and sort of smeggy smelling. My tastes and my sense of smell have changed, not to mention my digestion, which has other ideas about my determination to be flexible about veganism when we’re in company. I am still at heart a moderate and a pleaser. I have accepted that my choice is not, in fact an extreme one, but a rational and moderate one, but I am still a coward about the sense of embarrassment caused by other people’s extreme responses to it. If I could have stayed a nice, easy-to-accommodate, milk-and-cheese-consuming vegetarian, I would have.
But I couldn’t, and my decision was not principally about animal suffering. I had grown used to the awareness that I was contributing to a brutal, unceasing process of slaughter. I turned my attention from it for over two decades: it’s no secret that the dairy industry is just as vicious, revolting and creatively cruel as the meat industry. Veal is a by-product of dairy herds, after all, not of beef. My ignorance of the specifics or the numbers of horrific deaths was not because the information was unavailable, but because I accepted it as just ‘the way the world is’, divorced from my responsibility, and didn’t want to know. It took a marketing masterstroke to get me to look at the situation.
That masterstroke is Cowspiracy, which I am sure, if you are at all interested in anything to do with food politics, equality, environmentalism, or are just a Netflix subscriber, you will have heard of, if only through being bored silly by someone whose mind has already been blown by it. Cowspiracy is not that different in content to many other food documentaries: it’s about an hour and a half long, it draws on Campbell’s China Study to make it pretty clear that all meat consumption is toxic to humans; it draws on The Omnivore’s Dilemma2 to examine the forces that are behind the religiosity of meat production in the U.S. and it is very strong on the insane economics of mass meat consumption. However, its genius is that it is marketed as being an attack on the environmental movement and, specifically, on the environmental movement’s failure to address the climate change consequences of the meat industry. Rather than going for the meat industry itself, it takes a sideswipe at Greenpeace3, Sea Shepherd4, and various other fashionable, but, presumably, well-intentioned5 environmental campaign organisations, for ignoring a very, very straightforward fact: meat production is dirty.
In fact, the meat industry is the dirtiest industry there is. Yes it is. It does more damage to the global environment than the oil industry or mining or even the transport industry. The main issues with it are that it uses a shitload of fossil fuels and has an eye-watering CO2 burden and that it puts out a massive amount of methane. Methane, as a greenhouse gas, is actually more damaging than carbon dioxide, but also more volatile, so that a reduction in its emission would create a useful and real environmental benefit far faster than a reduction in CO2 emissions, which stay in the atmosphere for much longer.
Besides the methane issue which, on its own, was enough to convince me that it was worth going vegan, the CO2 figures really shocked me. I have tried, as far as I can, to be environmentally responsible for the last ten years, since I shared a flat with a geology student who convinced me that there was little hope of avoiding civilizational collapse due to climate change, because the economic changes required were so severe that they wouldn’t happen. Up until that point, angry about the world as I had been for much of my life, I had held a sort of, ‘It’ll be alright, long term; no need to panic’ view of politics. The wonderful events of 1989, totally unforeseen in the dark world of my teens when we all thought that the nuclear apocalypse was imminent, had given me a rosy view of reality: a faith in the ultimate goodness of people. When I realised that the predictions of environmental catastrophe really were hard science and that this was not a trendy marketing position to keep us scared, I felt a powerful desire to not be complicit. So, rather than buy a car to get to work, I bought a bike. I shopped locally. I tried to not buy anything I didn’t have a good need for. I gave up, as far as I could, using anything disposable, like coffee cups and plastic cutlery. I practised an entire litany of self-imposed dicta that made life complicated but gave me a rosy glow. “At least,” I thought, “I’m not ruining the planet with a car engine just to get to work.”
It turns out that I really needn’t have bothered. ALL transport: that is, everything that burns oil for movement, produces only 13% of greenhouse emissions. Now, that’s not trivial. It’s incredibly bad, in fact, and it needs to change, if only because there are too many non-smokers getting lung cancer, and too many people are dying from being hit by cars, and too much of the fuel is burnt in the high atmosphere by jet aeroplanes, where its damage is magnified. However, livestock production contributes 18%, and it does so in complex ways: through transport within the industry, yes, but also through the destruction of habitats, and simply through the fact that animals make a lot of shit:
The livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The largest share of this derives from land-use changes – especially deforestation –caused by expansion of pastures and arable land for feedcrops. Livestock are responsible for much larger shares of some gases with far higher potential to warm the atmosphere. The sector emits 37 percent of anthropogenic methane (with 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2) most of that from enteric fermentation by ruminants. It emits 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide (with 296 times the GWP of CO2), the great majority from manure. Livestock are also responsible for almost two-thirds (64 percent) of anthropogenic ammonia emissions, which contribute significantly to acid rain and acidification of ecosystems.
Food & Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Livestock’s Long Shadow, p236
The inherent environmental problems with animal manufacture are magnified by intensification and industrialisation. The best description I’ve read of the real damage done by this process is in The Omnivore’s Dilemma7, by Michael Pollan. The first third of this book is superb: the rest is pretty compromised by his determination to justify his own inclination to continue eating meat, despite the obvious conclusions his research drives us towards. I suspect this is a political decision: he can get his research into the mainstream media so long as he doesn’t cross the meat industry head on, but it may be that he is, as I was, at heart a moderate, who is inclined to liberal compromise despite the obvious logic of his findings. However, on the relationship between seed monopolies, meat cartels and the absurd structures their rationalised methods have given rise to, he is good. If you want to know why cows – grass eating animals – are fed corn and kept in concrete pens where their shit is dumped into the water system, read his book. If you’re more of a hour-and-a-half movie sort of person, try Food Inc., but bear in mind that both these sources are sponsored by Pepsico. Their refusal to accept the outcomes of their own logic compromises them badly.
The glaring element that Michael Pollan fails to adequately address is land use. His solution for the disasters raised by industrialised meat production is de-industrialisation: let’s only eat ‘nice’ meat: the main deceit of Mcdonald’s ‘good to know’ lies. Cowspiracy pretty much demolishes that in five minutes. It shows a ‘nice’ farm, and then it calculates how much land it would take to supply America’s current volume of meat consumption with ‘nice’ meat, ignoring, for the sake of argument, that most land isn’t rich enough to make the sort of ‘nice’ meat that Pollan advocates for. Each calorie needs a vast acreage. There is no such thing as sustainable meat farming. In a way, the current, industrialised methods are, at least, honest about what it means to consume meat and dairy. It is a meat grinder, even before the slaughter.
So, yeah, beef is a problem, but why not go small scale? Well, keeping your own hens is fine, but what are you going to do with the cocks? Okay, you probably won’t put the live chicks through a grinding machine8, as the industrialised egg industry does9, but you’re going to have to deal with half your flock being useless. Will you eat them? Well, that’s a neat solution, but you’ve got to feed them until they’re at the right weight, and you then hit another illogical element in the meat economy: the wastage that meat production actually is.
Two thirds of the land being used by humans is currently used to produce feed stock for animals. Two thirds. We have a billion people who regularly suffer hunger; eight hundred million of them are chronically undernourished – routinely unable to get enough food. Food prices are insanely high for most of the human population of the planet (excluding the spoilt population within the third of the world where their food prices are subsidised by the rest of humanity’s hunger or, at least, food insecurity) because agricultural land is reserved for the production of waste calories, to be fed into animals, rather than to provide nutrition for humans. That wasted food produces one calorie of meat for every seven calories produced, and that is a cautious figure, so six sevenths – 86% – of the food produced in the world, is used to make shit and sweat and cow farts, without ever producing a usable product for human consumption. We are, in effect, burning nearly nine tenths of our agricultural production, and using live, suffering creatures as the furnaces: 65 000 000 000 of them per year, and rising.
And that land, it’s not a benefit. Agricultural economists refer to the ‘development’ of land when it is turned into agricultural assets. What they are referring to is the cutting down of trees and the burning off of undergrowth: a genocide of the richest life supporting environment on the globe. The expansion of industrial agriculture has been into exactly the environments we can least afford to lose if we are to avoid disastrous climate change. That land is already providing optimal benefit, and turning it into cow pasture is a radical diminishing of its true economic value. Since the 1970s, 20% of the Amazon’s rain forests have been destroyed, and 80% of that land is being used for livestock, the overwhelming part of it for the American meat industry. Besides the very significant impact this has had on the ecosphere’s ability to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, and besides the frightening disruption this represents to the global water cycle through the diminution of the evaporation that is forests’ role in the hydrological process, the loss of species diversity is huge: a quarter of all mammal species, one eighth of bird species and a third of all fish species are at risk of extinction. We simply cannot know the figures for plant, insect or bacterial species.
And we need those species. It is now accepted that less than 1% of flowering plant species have been studied for nutritional, medicinal and other resource value. Many of the plant species we are wiping out with the eradication of rain forests will not have been known; their value as nutrient providers or antibiotics never discovered. Thanks, in large part, to the meat industry, we are on the verge of being once again vulnerable, as a species, to untreatable bacterial disease. My grandfather, a village doctor who had been traumatised by deaths from infection among his patients in the first world war, treated the miracle of antibiotics, when they became available for prescription, as a wonder akin to ending hunger. In just over two generations, we have reached the point where we can see the end of that miracle10 and, if you read the WHO factsheet closely, you-ll see that, behind the measured and politic tone, it is antibiotic use in the livestock industry that is promoting anti-microbial resistance.
It is thanks to large scale use of antibiotics in meat farming that we are facing super resistant bacteria. Antibiotics are used in factory farming both to attack bacteria and because they act as growth promoters. The animals are already very sensitive to disease because they live in what is, effectively, a monoculture and are fed a very restricted, processed diet and this inhibits the development of their immune systems. Plus, the crazed circle of feeding maize to cattle – an unnatural food – means their digestive immunities are ineffective, so digestive diseases are endemic and have to be controlled by antibiotics.
Thanks to this pathogenic stew, the emergence of new diseases in non-human animals is accelerating: because animals are being kept in exotic conditions, they are vulnerable to exotic and novel diseases11. And these are transmitting to humans. 60% of human pathogens are of non-human origin anyway, and 75% of emerging animal diseases can be transmitted to humans. Treatments for human sufferers of these exotic diseases are made difficult by the vicious circle of wasteful use of anti-pathogens (antibiotics and anti-virals) in livestock production. These ‘biosecurity’ responses are terribly expensive, wasteful and, on a large scale, ineffective and, until these diseases get a grip on the human population, we cannot know which we have to guard against, which is why all the massive mobilisation against swine flu and against avian flu was pointless, but the next one might not be.12
I love a good apocalypse scenario. I grew up in the eighties, at the high peak of cold war hysteria, and there is something comforting to me about being able to identify a clear route to imminent human extinction. The counterpoint to that, however, is the desire to learn enough to understand that it is not as likely as it looks. That was how it actually was in the eighties: once we were able to look back, we saw that the Russians had not had any intention of rolling the tanks and would not in fact have been able to afford the fuel to do it from about ‘82 onwards. The economic collapse of the Soviet Union, and the exhaustion of the Soviet military after Afghanistan, actually made for a far more stable world in my teens that we thought at the time. The essential element in a good millennialist fantasy is that there needs to be a get out clause: an escape route.
I don’t buy the suggestion that there is a conspiracy of silence about the contribution of meat production to climate change. The IPCC seem to take agricultural contributions13 to anthropogenic climate change seriously; the UK government at least measures and publishes figures14, and, indeed, Greenpeace DO campaign on the issue5, despite Cowspiracy’s narrative trick. That was the hook, to make a good film that stood out and was able to circumvent some of the fear, uncertainty and doubt about the reliability of climate change information that the food industry circulates. Over the past twenty years, they have done a very good job of marginalising an extremely large and passionate popular movement – the animal rights movement – from mainstream voices. They even sued Oprah15, for fuck’s sake! (The link is to the excellent website of an admirable gentleman who appears in Cowspiracy and who was co-defendent when Ms Winfrey was persecuted under the Texas ‘veggie libel’ laws – laws sponsored by the meat industry and designed to give it free rein to silence criticism. There is a doctoral study on the case,16, which I link to mainly because the supervising academic is the wonderfully named Professor Hamm.) By apparently shifting blame onto a surprising source, Cowspiracy was able to use a little of its own fear, uncertainty and doubt tactics against the liars of the meat industry. It was a clever approach, that served its purpose in publicising a very concise and clear summary of the issues around a terrible and growing disaster that was close to being immune to criticism. I highly recommend the film.
However, while environmental issues may have been what drove me to become vegan at last, what is keeping me so is a broader mixture of motives. Not least among them is the fact that it is quite pleasant. I am feeling very well, thank you very much for asking, despite still liking a couple of beers most nights and having smoked for much of this past summer. At the age of forty-nine, I cycle to work two or three times a week, towing a trailer with about twenty kilos of paperwork and laptops in it. Last week, my total mileage, including a leisure trip into Newport on Saturday, was over fifty. I have not had the routine two colds a year that I used to get and am nowhere near as unhealthy as I was when I was a taxi driver. I am back down to a thirty-four inch waist, having got to a point at one stage, on a dairy-rich diet, where thirty-six was tight.
What has surprised me is how veganism has changed my attitude towards animals: the cruelty blinkers do drop. In trendy vegan-speak, your compassion is heightened by not participating in the cruelty. I have always considered myself a little over-sensitive, for a man, but this past year, I have been surprised by the degree to which the level of suffering in the world has bothered me, and my inability to shut it out. Powerless, I sign petitions and rant on Facebook, but it does no good. My politics have become less domesticated; the neutering effect of the media fog no longer works on me and I am looking elsewhere for my explanations of what is going on in the world.
For a middle aged man, who grew up in an agricultural area, and whose life has been marked by a desire to fit in and be normal, calling oneself a vegan feels like a peculiar step: one of those irreversible decisions. It is fourteen months since Amanda and I decided to try it for a month and I have no desire to go back. I still try to be a little flexible where it might cause awkwardness; in restaurants or at friends’ houses, but I have got a point where I pay a digestive price for that flexibility, and I am also more practised at working around the difficulties; taking some non-dairy milk with me for tea, or phoning ahead to arrange something with the restaurant.
Clothing is an interesting area, where I am really noticing that I have crossed a line. I could not afford to just throw out my clothing: I am still wearing leather boots, for instance. However, I have needed to replace some clothing, particularly for cycling. I have always worn merino wool baselayers in the winter, but I have just bought a couple of bamboo-viscose baselayers. 17 They took a bit of finding, and they are not cheap (though no more expensive than the posh wool ones that have now developed holes through overuse) but they are better, in terms of resisting becoming wet and smelly under heavy use, and in terms of wind resistance and cosiness, than the animal hair products they replace. Cycling shoes, fortunately, don’t seem to use much leather nowadays: there is plenty of choice: I just need to save up, but even the cheaper Specialized ones seem to be vegan friendly. As for day-to-day footwear, that is still undiscovered country. I have had my Docs resoled, and intend to continue to do so: it is the right thing to do. Surprisingly, though, I do feel a little sensitive about the fact that they are leather, even though I think the reuse rather than replace principle trumps the squeamish, disassociate-yourself-from-the-death-industry principle. I have my eye on a pair of rather nifty vegan boots18, but they will have to wait a few months yet.
This started with my sister, and it will end with her. She eats meat now, and that is her choice. I do not judge. In her teens, however, she was quite intense about injustice, cruelty and illogic, and her wide ranging cultural influences have effected me throughout my life. On her bedroom wall, among the posters for bands like Everything but the Girl and The Smiths, Crass and The Cure, she had a flyer from an animal rights meeting. It contained a quote from Jeremy Bentham. That quote has stayed with me, nagging at me like a sort of inevitable moral burden, through my progress from meat eater, to vegetarian, all the way to the point where I could no longer ignore the fact that my consumption and luxury rested on an ongoing monstrosity that was hurting my soul, and the collective soul of humanity.
The flyer had a picture of a lamb, pictured from a distance, from above, looking alone, wobbly, threatened by its isolation and physical vulnerability. Beside that image, the text stood out like an accusation against my meat-eating, selfish, teenage conscience:
The question is not, can they think, or can they talk. The question is, can they suffer?
One of the unanticipated pleasures of middle-age is the discovery that, if I do not seek, I will stumble upon what I need to make sense of what is troubling me. After thirty years of reading, I have enough of a reservoir of referents that I am able to drift up textual tributaries for no other reason than to be open to their possibilities, and I am constantly surprised by how often I collide with timely observations.
I have had such an experience this morning. In an LRB review1 of a new biography of Roland Barthes, Michael Wood says this:
Late in life he notoriously said language was fascist “…because fascism is not the prevention of speech but the forced obligation to speak.”
The forced obligation to speak. It is a wonderful description of a form of social pressure of which I am annoyingly aware at the moment.
Today is the first Sunday after 11th November: ‘Remembrance Sunday’, a day of secular reverence for war. It is marketed as “remembering the fallen,” but excludes, in any honest way, the recognition of the slaughter of non-combatants: 70% of ‘the fallen’ in wars since 1918. It is a celebration of militarism, homo-erotically focussed upon the ‘sacrifice’ of the belligerents in war, and, more narrowly, the belligerents who talk like us, look like us, or, second best, defer to us.
I have not worn a paper and plastic poppy for at least ten years, nor put coins in the collecting tins of the old people in be-medalled blazers, often wearing their berets to assert their authenticity, who sit by supermarket doors for the two weeks leading up to this festival. Apparently, the medals and berets are important these days, as there is quite a large clique of people who have not ‘served’2 but who have adopted the trappings of ‘veteran’ status,3 in order to be a part of this newly-ennobled class: the unexamined ‘heroes’ of tabloid myth.
My non-participant status is not a casual or trivial thing for me. My father, who was a regular soldier (not a conscript) for nine years in the 1950s and ‘60s, was a British Legion (the charity which organises the collections and produces the poppies) volunteer and collector throughout my childhood. Although he regards the wearing of medals and uniform knick-knacks as vulgar, for decades, he took his place in Tesco’s draughty doorway, and went door-to-door in his community, and was a secretary for a British Legion branch. For his generation, who grew up knowing the damaged and broken human remnants of the first world war, the sense of mourning, rather than celebration, that was embodied by the Poppy appeal was a very immediate and true thing. His grandmother, Winifred Levy, had a barometer with a glass that was cracked when a bomb from a Zeppelin fell near her East end home. My mother’s father, Capt. William King Churchouse MC, a village doctor, ran a field hospital throughout the first world war, and never recovered from the experience. He died when my mother was fourteen. You can see the London Gazette’s record of his demobilisation in 1923 here,4 in the right-hand column, under the records for the Royal Army Medical Corps.
As a small child during the second world war, my mother watched the bombing of Coventry from a hillside in her village; she has described to me the shuddering of the sky as the flashes of explosion after explosion tore the city apart. I remember the sense of awe I felt, growing up unthreatened (as I then thought) by war, imagining the awareness of the closeness of horror on an overwhelming scale.
That awe was renewed when, working in Southampton around the turn of the millennium, I learnt of the horrors of the Southampton blitz.5
I was appalled to learn about a direct hit upon a public shelter, and that some bomb sites could not be dug out, but were treated as graves. The fact that the city art gallery is a replacement for the original building that was destroyed by another direct hit during a visit by a group of school children, nearly all of whom died, buried beneath the wrecked building, is enough to inspire deep sorrow.
But, my parents are almost eighty, and the first world war was twenty years over when they were born: they were young children when the second world war ended. The first is now history; the second in that curious sense of the past where we know of it more through a previous generation’s obsession than through any real relationship with the events. Still, though, we worship the participants, smoothing out the stories, interpreting them, not as events in their own right, but as mirrors in which we distort our constructions of the current world.
I can remember that the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the second world war, in 1995, was supposed to signal an end to national obsession with that conflict. I seem to remember the Queen saying as much, but, six years later, we were dragged into a state of perpetual war by our ‘allies’ and, since then, the mythological weight of the two world wars has been levered into service to justify a new wave of militarism: not the marginalised fetishism of the sad men who adopt a false past of military adventure to fill out unfulfilled lives; not just the ever-present Parolles6 of pub cliché, but the entire state, has revived the exultation of war; the unquestioning adulation of soldiers; the stifling, narrowing language of two-dimensional celebration. And, of course, the war industry, which is already a subsidised golden cow, is loving it.
This was amplified by a new, hardcore manifestation of military ‘charity’: the ‘Help for Heroes’ movement which, while it comes complete with moving story of its founders’ motivations, has manifested, as far as I can see, as a PR organisation for the war industry, campaigning for deification of the military and diverting a huge amount of charitable giving into Ministry of Defence coffers. It is linked closely with the Murdoch Corporation; they are inseparable really, although the Daily Telegraph has the true-believer ardour of the “me too” participant. Its public pronouncements are usually fronted by retired procurement-whore generals making vague generalisations about sacrifice and service. In truth, as numerous scandals have revealed, it has been more concerned with political lobbying and the manipulation of popular perception of warfare than with assisting its client base. Any criticism has been fiercely crushed: the BBC was slapped down for daring to question its expenditure and the rest of the British journalism community seems to have just fallen into line. At a time when government policy has vilified and brutalised disabled people as a whole, ex-soldiers who have been left disabled by their misadventures are an untouchable aristocracy, at least in the media, although a surprising number of stories continue to crop up about them being unable to access practical help when they face difficulties. It’s almost as if all that money, diverted from real charity, was going into someone else’s pockets.
Every year there is some ‘scandal’ about the non-wearing of poppies. Usually it has to do with someone not wearing one on the BBC; it’s a time-honoured dirge. This year, the war worshippers took it to an international level, with a frankly embarrassing constructed ‘row’ about armbands in a football tournament. I won’t rehearse the whole sordid spectacle, but it is worth reading the BBC article7
and clicking on the links: it has all the hallmarks of a classic tabloid moral panic, including a bandwagon-jumping MP, football players and The Sun talking bollocks about a foreign institution.
These moral panics are aimed, of course, at trying to overlay objection to militarism with a taint of immorality. Anti-war is anti-‘hero’. The great problem faced by anyone who wants to profit from war is persuading a country to pay for it, and the moral reversal implicit in the substitution of ‘hero’ for ‘active war participant’ goes a long way to clouding over the objections that reasonable voices might raise to the funding of genocidal foreign adventurism.
Still, there are voices8 who plug on against the military worship,((http://mbherald.com/dont-wear-poppy/)) but they are scattered and marginalised and, often, they are apologetic, as if they know that they are speaking against the tenor of the mob. They are still able to speak about it, though. But to not wear a poppy:9 that is a difficult position. This year, I have not had the awful “Where’s your poppy?” question, although I have had in the past, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the pressure: the forced obligation of the Barthes quote.
