It's always puzzled me, this thing about people getting right-wing as they get older. You'd think that the opposite would happen.
I mean, as you get older, you notice that the world keeps having the same problems, and that they tend to have the same underlying causes, and that nothing is ever done about them. You notice more and more of the same kinds of scandals reoccurring over the years, time and again, and always based upon imbalances of power, and upon powerful people being unaccountable. You're more likely to have a mortgage and debts, the older you are. You're more likely to owe lots of money to banks and credit agencies, and to be crippled by these debts. You're more likely to have health problems, and thus to need medical care, and thus to see that the Health Service is underfunded and overstretched. You're more likely to realise that your investments and savings (if you have any) don't pay off in anything like the way you're told they will when you're younger. You're more likely to worry about how you will look after yourself and your partner in old age. You're more likely to notice your retirement receding into the distance. You're more likely to find yourself paying through the nose for medications that go with age, medications your parents didn't have to pay through the nose for. You're more likely to meet more and more people of different 'races' and nationalities, and thus to notice that they're not too different to you. You're more likely to have been mistreated at work, or sacked, or been forced to find second jobs or third jobs. You're more likely to have seen talentless people around you rising while you stay still, simply because they were born with advantages you never had. You're more likely to have lived through several wars and recessions instead of just one or two. You're more likely to have observed the way the world's weather systems have catastrophically changed even in the last few decades. You're more likely to have seen friends' lives ruined by discrimination or depression or stress. You're more likely to have seen your parents face an uncertain and neglected old age. And you're more likely to have kids and grandkids, and to see all the challenges they face. A restricted job market, more and more pressure on them to work harder to have a chance of being employed one day, the escalating cost of further and higher education, more debt earlier in life, less chance of being able to afford to buy a house or even move out of their parents' home, spiraling costs of living, less social safety nets, a squeezed education system. And on and on it goes.
Decades of life means decades of observing the world getting worse, and the so-called solutions never working, and the so-called progressive parties always selling people out, and the persistence of poverty and corruption never being addressed, and inequality and injustice always being at the root of the problems. And it means becoming more and more vulnerable, as an individual or as part of a family, to the insecurity and hardships capitalism causes and relies upon.
Basically, the saying "you get more right-wing as you get older" is something only applicable to people who are already economically and socially privileged. Such people can afford to dabble with being left-wing when they're young, if they feel like it. They can rely on rich parents to bankroll such flirtations with leftiness. When they're young and cushioned, it costs them nothing. Principles are always easier if they cost you nothing. Then, as they get older, they take their place in the system of privilege that was always waiting to welcome them. They see their savings and investments rising (because, generally, the more you have the more you make from it), their property becoming more and more valuable, their financial situation getting comfier and more secure every day. At the very least, they see themselves comparatively insulated. Their parents enjoy a luxurious old-age and then die, leaving them more property and investments and savings. Their own children and grandchildren don't have to worry about the deficiencies of state education, or the deficiencies of the NHS, or the debts accrued during further and higher education, or the uncertainties of the job market. Jobs wait for them. Economic security is built into life for such people and their families. Like all people with privilege, their primary focus is to hold onto it ferociously. We all know that privilege causes people to feel aggrieved by the faintest suggestion of a challenge to their privilege. This is at the root of much misogyny. Patriarchy causes men think of women as appliances. How angry would you be if your vacuum cleaner suddenly refused to work? I dunno about you, but when things like that happen to me I swear at the errant machine and feel pretty damned aggrieved. Men extend the same logic to women who don't want to be treated as equipment. And Corey Robin, a historian of ideas, has done some very good work describing how modern conservatism is, at bottom, the ideological expression of the struggle to retain privilege.
This pattern is most pronounced in the very rich, of course. But it used to hold pretty reliably (if scaled down) for the moderately rich, and down to the middle classes. (It even used to hold for a certain extent to the working classes during the long post-war boom, which looks like a utopia of economic justice, job security and progressive welfarism compared to where we are now.) However, like many old cultural certainties of capitalism, this pattern is breaking up - with increasing speed. (Capitalism does this.) The middle classes and petty bourgeoisie are more and more squeezed, more and more threatened by uncertainty. The iron law of neoliberalism is the redistribution of wealth upwards - and this is really just a variation on what always happens in capitalism during its built-in periodic crises. And, the bottom looking increasingly drained, neoliberalism - especially now in this era of crisis and austerity - is feeding on the middle.
Of course, the people in the middle can't be expected to draw left-wing conclusions from all this. Such people generally drift to... da daaa!... the populist far-right (i.e. UKIP, BNP, the Tea Party, various European equivalents). And, in the absence of organised organs of workers' struggle, the people at the bottom will often drift that way too. Especially when you factor in the massive effort neoliberal capitalism puts into pushing and sustaining ideological disorientation.
Neoliberal capitalism itself is getting more ideologically right-wing as it gets older. The only sane response is to go in the other direction.
But it's not easy. Because, with that lifetime of confronting the horrors there also comes a lifetime of getting entangled in the very hard work and stress it takes to navigate them, and the fatalism of seeing nothing ever getting better, and the pessimism of constant defeats, and the confusion sewn by decades of 'There Is No Alternative'. That's why the only thing that has a chance of fundamentally altering this downward spiral is a resurgence in working class organisation, in the teeth of the longstanding and hugely-successful neoliberal project of destroying the power of unions.
That's why every success for the left, however compromised, however embedded in reformist politics and parliamentarianism, has to be seized upon.
Because the dialectic of change has to start somewhere.
ideas are icepickproof
Wednesday, 28 January 2015
Saturday, 24 January 2015
Greece is the Word
Yes, yes, Syriza is a bourgeois reformist party which has drifted to
the right even in the last few years. I know. A Syriza victory will
not bring full communism in Greece. No, true. A Syriza government will cave in
and give up all over the place. The way all bourgeois reformist parties
always do, even quite Lefty ones. Yes. I know.
I knows and knows and knows.
The point is that, as with all Left-wing reformist parties, it will be as strong or as weak as the movement among the working class. It will be pushed to the Left by a genuine movement on the streets and in the workplaces. Or to the Right by the absence of such a movement.
The anti-reformist gloom of writing off Syriza before it starts is, paradoxically, the gloom of the reformist. It is the gloom of those who secretly expect (or want) elected governments to do it all for them.
A Syriza victory would create a space within Austerity neoliberalism for a challenge (however partial and bourgeois and reformist and imperfect) to the prevailing, even suffocating, orthodoxy. The punishing flow of weath upwards may be slowed, just a bit, just for a change, somewhere. And, with work and struggle, this could be exploited and built upon. This would push the government further. Which would expand the space for resistance, etc etc etc.
Every victory - however partial - for the working class is to be chased and seized upon and celebrated (yes, critically celebrated, of course) because every victory for the working class, evey improvement in the position and confidence of the working class, strengthens the only force in the world that has the power, ultimately, to fundamentally change it for the better.
This isn't a fully worked out theoretical position. There are plenty of better places you can go for that.
I knows and knows and knows.
The point is that, as with all Left-wing reformist parties, it will be as strong or as weak as the movement among the working class. It will be pushed to the Left by a genuine movement on the streets and in the workplaces. Or to the Right by the absence of such a movement.
The anti-reformist gloom of writing off Syriza before it starts is, paradoxically, the gloom of the reformist. It is the gloom of those who secretly expect (or want) elected governments to do it all for them.
A Syriza victory would create a space within Austerity neoliberalism for a challenge (however partial and bourgeois and reformist and imperfect) to the prevailing, even suffocating, orthodoxy. The punishing flow of weath upwards may be slowed, just a bit, just for a change, somewhere. And, with work and struggle, this could be exploited and built upon. This would push the government further. Which would expand the space for resistance, etc etc etc.
Every victory - however partial - for the working class is to be chased and seized upon and celebrated (yes, critically celebrated, of course) because every victory for the working class, evey improvement in the position and confidence of the working class, strengthens the only force in the world that has the power, ultimately, to fundamentally change it for the better.
This isn't a fully worked out theoretical position. There are plenty of better places you can go for that.
Tuesday, 20 January 2015
American Auton
One thing has become clear: Clint Eastwood is actually a deeply left-wing, anti-imperialist auteur with a profoundly sceptical and cynical attitude to America, war and patriotism.
It's the fake baby that proves it.
A sentimentalised emblem of American family life... represented on screen as something blatantly unreal, synthetic, cheap, ersatz, evidently and transparently fake... and yet none of the ostensibly admirable icons of American values notice it! Instead the fake baby is cooed over like a beautiful, perfect, inspirational, precious, living child... even as Bradley Cooper (who must have been in on Eastwood's satirical joke at the expense of red-state America, the Pentagon and all so-called 'Heartland values') brazenly waggles the mannequin's little plastic hand and pretends the baby is moving by itself.
Let's repeat that: he pretends the baby is moving. In this we see not only a Swiftian subversion of the exploitation of children as a lachrymose pavlovian trigger for tears of jingoistic pride in the eyes of America's right-wing ideologues, but also a deeply disturbing reminder of all those babies - blown to pieces, dissolved in white phosphorous, or starved - who will never move on their own ever again thanks to the rampant violence of American military adventurism.
The symbol of America's bright and moral future is literally a dead, hollow, plastic replica... and none of the characters notice. Too brainwashed by flags and Fox News and the 4th of July to see the cold, lifeless truth even when they hold it. And the idealised American child, the child of the patriot who has killed again and again for the US imperium, is also a reminder of the countless really dead babies that America has left in its wake across the globe.
Moreover, we - the audience - are evidently supposed to pretend we don't notice. And he's tricked loads of reactionaries into doing just that. Praising this superficially jingoistic, neo-con movie while silently passing over an insultingly blatant (and, on the face of it, ludicrous) piece of diegetic disruption.
Eastwood - who is obviously secretly more far-left than Michael Moore - has trolled the entire country. He's even trolled those critics who have pointed out the fakeness of the baby! Do they think he doesn't know it's obviously fake? How myopic are these people? How myopic are the liberal critics of the film who have totally failed to comprehend the depth of Eastwood's scabrous, scathing subversion? Eastwood has placed a blatant and horrifying truth about fakeness and sentimentality right in front of the entire United States... and he has stood back and let us watch as they all fail to see it.
It's Eastwood's most ascerbic bit of leftist absurdism, his most acidically situationist bit of surrealist theatre since the talking-to-the-empty-chair masterpiece (a performance of inspired performative lunacy that he managed to trick the GOP into letting him do on stage at their conference!).
It's also possibly the most devastatingly subtle - yet also furiously dyspeptic and radical - comment on modern America in recent cinema.
Comrade Eastwood, I salute you.
Saturday, 3 January 2015
Once
The Doctor and Felix came to the village
of Once on New Years'
Eve. Or rather, they came to where the village of Once
had once been.
"Where is it?" asked Felix in his lilting German accent, staring into the empty valley beyond the copse in which they stood.
The Doctor tipped her head forwards slightly, to let accumulated snow tumble from the crown and brim of her battered, crumpled old top hat.
"Exactly," she said.
The village had disappeared years ago, she told him.
"Well," she continued, her words turning to steam in the cold air, "nobody knows exactly when it happened... or should I say when it, the village I mean, stopped happening."
It had taken a few months of accumulated surprises and puzzlements and disappointments and silences and ominous remarks before the conscious realisation had gradually dawned upon the people in the surrounding villages that the village of Once was no longer there.
"The government realised pretty quickly of course," continued the Doctor, "because the people in Once stopped paying their taxes. But the government kept quiet about it, in case it gave any other villages ideas. As best as anyone can make out, the village vanished from existence somewhere between Christmas and New Years, 1849."
"I suppose it has become one of those perennial mysteries," suggested Felix in his perfect schoolboy English, "like the Mary Celeste? "
"Umm, not really," said the Doctor, "You see, hierarchical cultures actually have a very low tolerance for mysteries that are genuinely mysterious. They prefer prosaic mysteries. The Mary Celeste, for instance. I mean it's odd certainly, but the broad outlines of it aren't all that challenging to any common sense ideas about how the world works. The ship was discovered with the crew and passengers gone. Obviously, then, they left. The reason why they left may be obscure, but the essential mechanism of the event is comprehensible enough. They left. People can, and will, do that. But an entire village physically vanishing, structures and roads and farm animals and all..." she smiled wryly "...that's a bit different. That sort of thing just doesn't happen. Or rather, it does happen, but it's - if you'll pardon me - vanishingly rare. When it happens, people get very nervous. It undermines their sense of reality. Human beings disappearing, that's one thing. But property? That's another. Especially in England."
Felix chuckled. "So this is one of those mysteries that polite English people do not talk about."
(The Doctor, by the way, genuinely doesn't know what happened on board the Mary Celeste. It's one of the strange things about the Doctor's life: we know a lot more about some of the events in it than she does.)
They left the shelter of the copse and walked until they reached the bottom of the empty valley. Their feet crunched in the snow, and ice-blue moonlight pooled in the caverns of their footprints.
Felix began to have a very strange sense that he was following a road that he could not see, passing houses that were almost - but not quite - visible.
He suddenly became aware of how cold he was. How his toes were stinging with the cold even inside his boots. How numb his fingers were. He hunched over in his greatcoat and plunged his hands into his armpits. It was like being back in the trenches.
The Doctor didn't seem to notice the cold, or how it was affecting Felix. She wore her threadbare astrakhan jacket buttoned up, but that meant nothing. She wore it like that whatever the weather.
"So how can an entire village just disappear?" he asked in an attempt to chivvy the Doctor along a bit, "Structures and roads and farm animals and all?"
"A surprising question," said the Doctor, "coming from someone who's actually been in villages that stopped existing the same day."
"That's war," said Felix sadly, who had met the Doctor at a football match in No-Man's-Land on Christmas Day 1914. She had played defensive midfield, and had impressed him by tackling him with great ferocity as he made a bid for the two trenchcoats bundled on the ground nearest the British lines. The bruises on his shins had taken almost a fortnight to fade.
"This might be sign of a war too," said the Doctor. "The universe is like a battlefield sometimes. Great powers struggling with each other for reasons incomprehensible to the little people who get caught in the rain of shells..."
"So a... a shell, fired as part of some astral conflict, went astray and this poor little innocent village became a casualty, just because it happened to be near the front line?"
Felix felt depressed by this idea. Could it really be that the entire universe worked according to the same horrible rules as that war from which he had just escaped?
The Doctor didn't answer. She seemed to have withdrawn into sad reflections of her own.
"Nobody ever tried to rebuild, then?" asked Felix nervously, "Or start a new village? It seems a waste. Such a fertile valley - in the warm months, I mean. A stream..." he pointed to a frozen crick, and then gestured around "...and good farming land..."
He knew about things like this. He was a country boy himself, born and bred in a little village not unlike Once must have been. Not unlike that village in Belgium...
"Another interesting aspect of the matter," said the Doctor ruminatively, "this peculiarly decorous refusal of anyone to reclaim the valley, or even to acknowledge that anything was ever here. You'll notice that there's no memorial. Nothing. And we're in..." she consulted her fob watch "...1962 now, so more than enough time has passed for people to feel as though the lost village of Once warrants some form of commemoration."
Felix was becoming distinctly unnerved. He felt as though he was surrounded by people, people who could only just be sensed in the corner of his eye, people who were not to be seen when he turned to look at them. He caught himself having to suppress little jumps of panic every time he sensed an invisible wall or door, or an unseen human presence near him.
He felt ashamed of his weakness. He hadn't been a nervous person a few months ago. The war had done it. But plenty of his comrades in the trenches had coped without becoming nervous wrecks.
He wondered if the presences around him were the ghosts of the annihilated villagers from long ago. He wondered if he could sense them because they had died in a war, and he was a soldier. Did that mean that they could sense him in return?
He became aware that the Doctor was watching him.
"I'm all right," he said.
She came over to him and threaded one of her arms through one of his.
"Cold?" she asked.
"No," he said, shaking his head solemnly even as his teeth chattered.
"Good," laughed the Doctor. Then, in a serious voice: "You can feel it too, can't you?"
Felix looked up at her. She was much taller than him.
"I'm not imagining it then?"
"No," she said.
"You expected it?"
"Yes."
He looked down. She'd been testing him again, or using him to test a conclusion of hers that she hadn't told him about. He didn't know how he felt about this. At best, it made him feel like an instrument. At worst, like a sheep being sent across a minefield.
"We may as well go back to the TARDIS," said the Doctor suddenly, "We've learned all we can here."
"What have we learnt?" asked Felix, who didn't feel any more wise than when they'd arrived - just colder.
"That the village is still here," she said. "Or rather... the village isn't here or not here. It's more complicated than that. But it has, at least, left traces. Traces that are sensible to human beings. That answers one question anyway. A question you asked earlier. The question of why nobody ever built here, or erected a memorial. People sensed that they'd be building on top of... or commemorating... something that was, in some way, still there. The people who came here sensed the village around them, just like you did. Of course, the past is always still around us... but more so here than in other places."
"So are we going to investigate?" asked Felix, who knew the Doctor well enough already to know the answer.
The Doctor nodded.
"How?" asked Felix.
The Doctor said nothing. She just started leading him out of the valley. They trod in their own footprints on the way back to the wood.
The TARDIS was in a tree. A grand, grave, elder-statesman of a horse chestnut. Winter had turned it into a thing of gaunt, rattling, bony arms. It looked like a snow-muffled riot of skeletons. The TARDIS doors were set into its trunk, their blue blending seamlessly at the edges with the green and the grey and the brown of the gnarled bark. The Doctor flourished her jangly mess of keys around the keyhole, and she and Felix clambered inside.
A few moments later, by their time, they emerged. They had just walked out of a moonlit night; now they emerged into a morning flooded with low sunlight. The tree was younger and smaller now, less grave and angry-looking, but just as skeletal. It was still winter, but a winter 113 years earlier than the one through which they'd just walked. Snow from 1962 fell from their boots into the snow of 1849. When the warmer weather came, it would all melt into the same puddles and then sink into the same earth. When the Doctor and her friends travel, water and dust and seeds and air will travel with them. The future and the past mingle and melt into each other, and cross-fertilise.
Felix was soon looking out from the edge of the same copse into the same valley. But this time, Once was there, cradled in the valley like eggs in a nest.
"By spending Christmas 1849 in the village of Once," said the Doctor quietly, gathering a stray garland of hair out of her face and tucking it back up under the brim of her hat. "New Years too perhaps. We'll see how it goes."
"Will I be welcome?" asked Felix.
"You should be a hit," said the Doctor, "if there's one thing Germans are good at - besides classical music and critiques of political economy - it's Christmas."
"Where is it?" asked Felix in his lilting German accent, staring into the empty valley beyond the copse in which they stood.
The Doctor tipped her head forwards slightly, to let accumulated snow tumble from the crown and brim of her battered, crumpled old top hat.
"Exactly," she said.
The village had disappeared years ago, she told him.
"Well," she continued, her words turning to steam in the cold air, "nobody knows exactly when it happened... or should I say when it, the village I mean, stopped happening."
It had taken a few months of accumulated surprises and puzzlements and disappointments and silences and ominous remarks before the conscious realisation had gradually dawned upon the people in the surrounding villages that the village of Once was no longer there.
"The government realised pretty quickly of course," continued the Doctor, "because the people in Once stopped paying their taxes. But the government kept quiet about it, in case it gave any other villages ideas. As best as anyone can make out, the village vanished from existence somewhere between Christmas and New Years, 1849."
"I suppose it has become one of those perennial mysteries," suggested Felix in his perfect schoolboy English, "like the Mary Celeste? "
"Umm, not really," said the Doctor, "You see, hierarchical cultures actually have a very low tolerance for mysteries that are genuinely mysterious. They prefer prosaic mysteries. The Mary Celeste, for instance. I mean it's odd certainly, but the broad outlines of it aren't all that challenging to any common sense ideas about how the world works. The ship was discovered with the crew and passengers gone. Obviously, then, they left. The reason why they left may be obscure, but the essential mechanism of the event is comprehensible enough. They left. People can, and will, do that. But an entire village physically vanishing, structures and roads and farm animals and all..." she smiled wryly "...that's a bit different. That sort of thing just doesn't happen. Or rather, it does happen, but it's - if you'll pardon me - vanishingly rare. When it happens, people get very nervous. It undermines their sense of reality. Human beings disappearing, that's one thing. But property? That's another. Especially in England."
Felix chuckled. "So this is one of those mysteries that polite English people do not talk about."
(The Doctor, by the way, genuinely doesn't know what happened on board the Mary Celeste. It's one of the strange things about the Doctor's life: we know a lot more about some of the events in it than she does.)
They left the shelter of the copse and walked until they reached the bottom of the empty valley. Their feet crunched in the snow, and ice-blue moonlight pooled in the caverns of their footprints.
Felix began to have a very strange sense that he was following a road that he could not see, passing houses that were almost - but not quite - visible.
He suddenly became aware of how cold he was. How his toes were stinging with the cold even inside his boots. How numb his fingers were. He hunched over in his greatcoat and plunged his hands into his armpits. It was like being back in the trenches.
The Doctor didn't seem to notice the cold, or how it was affecting Felix. She wore her threadbare astrakhan jacket buttoned up, but that meant nothing. She wore it like that whatever the weather.
"So how can an entire village just disappear?" he asked in an attempt to chivvy the Doctor along a bit, "Structures and roads and farm animals and all?"
"A surprising question," said the Doctor, "coming from someone who's actually been in villages that stopped existing the same day."
"That's war," said Felix sadly, who had met the Doctor at a football match in No-Man's-Land on Christmas Day 1914. She had played defensive midfield, and had impressed him by tackling him with great ferocity as he made a bid for the two trenchcoats bundled on the ground nearest the British lines. The bruises on his shins had taken almost a fortnight to fade.
"This might be sign of a war too," said the Doctor. "The universe is like a battlefield sometimes. Great powers struggling with each other for reasons incomprehensible to the little people who get caught in the rain of shells..."
"So a... a shell, fired as part of some astral conflict, went astray and this poor little innocent village became a casualty, just because it happened to be near the front line?"
Felix felt depressed by this idea. Could it really be that the entire universe worked according to the same horrible rules as that war from which he had just escaped?
The Doctor didn't answer. She seemed to have withdrawn into sad reflections of her own.
"Nobody ever tried to rebuild, then?" asked Felix nervously, "Or start a new village? It seems a waste. Such a fertile valley - in the warm months, I mean. A stream..." he pointed to a frozen crick, and then gestured around "...and good farming land..."
He knew about things like this. He was a country boy himself, born and bred in a little village not unlike Once must have been. Not unlike that village in Belgium...
"Another interesting aspect of the matter," said the Doctor ruminatively, "this peculiarly decorous refusal of anyone to reclaim the valley, or even to acknowledge that anything was ever here. You'll notice that there's no memorial. Nothing. And we're in..." she consulted her fob watch "...1962 now, so more than enough time has passed for people to feel as though the lost village of Once warrants some form of commemoration."
Felix was becoming distinctly unnerved. He felt as though he was surrounded by people, people who could only just be sensed in the corner of his eye, people who were not to be seen when he turned to look at them. He caught himself having to suppress little jumps of panic every time he sensed an invisible wall or door, or an unseen human presence near him.
He felt ashamed of his weakness. He hadn't been a nervous person a few months ago. The war had done it. But plenty of his comrades in the trenches had coped without becoming nervous wrecks.
He wondered if the presences around him were the ghosts of the annihilated villagers from long ago. He wondered if he could sense them because they had died in a war, and he was a soldier. Did that mean that they could sense him in return?
He became aware that the Doctor was watching him.
"I'm all right," he said.
She came over to him and threaded one of her arms through one of his.
"Cold?" she asked.
"No," he said, shaking his head solemnly even as his teeth chattered.
"Good," laughed the Doctor. Then, in a serious voice: "You can feel it too, can't you?"
Felix looked up at her. She was much taller than him.
"I'm not imagining it then?"
"No," she said.
"You expected it?"
"Yes."
He looked down. She'd been testing him again, or using him to test a conclusion of hers that she hadn't told him about. He didn't know how he felt about this. At best, it made him feel like an instrument. At worst, like a sheep being sent across a minefield.
"We may as well go back to the TARDIS," said the Doctor suddenly, "We've learned all we can here."
"What have we learnt?" asked Felix, who didn't feel any more wise than when they'd arrived - just colder.
"That the village is still here," she said. "Or rather... the village isn't here or not here. It's more complicated than that. But it has, at least, left traces. Traces that are sensible to human beings. That answers one question anyway. A question you asked earlier. The question of why nobody ever built here, or erected a memorial. People sensed that they'd be building on top of... or commemorating... something that was, in some way, still there. The people who came here sensed the village around them, just like you did. Of course, the past is always still around us... but more so here than in other places."
"So are we going to investigate?" asked Felix, who knew the Doctor well enough already to know the answer.
The Doctor nodded.
"How?" asked Felix.
The Doctor said nothing. She just started leading him out of the valley. They trod in their own footprints on the way back to the wood.
The TARDIS was in a tree. A grand, grave, elder-statesman of a horse chestnut. Winter had turned it into a thing of gaunt, rattling, bony arms. It looked like a snow-muffled riot of skeletons. The TARDIS doors were set into its trunk, their blue blending seamlessly at the edges with the green and the grey and the brown of the gnarled bark. The Doctor flourished her jangly mess of keys around the keyhole, and she and Felix clambered inside.
A few moments later, by their time, they emerged. They had just walked out of a moonlit night; now they emerged into a morning flooded with low sunlight. The tree was younger and smaller now, less grave and angry-looking, but just as skeletal. It was still winter, but a winter 113 years earlier than the one through which they'd just walked. Snow from 1962 fell from their boots into the snow of 1849. When the warmer weather came, it would all melt into the same puddles and then sink into the same earth. When the Doctor and her friends travel, water and dust and seeds and air will travel with them. The future and the past mingle and melt into each other, and cross-fertilise.
Felix was soon looking out from the edge of the same copse into the same valley. But this time, Once was there, cradled in the valley like eggs in a nest.
"By spending Christmas 1849 in the village of Once," said the Doctor quietly, gathering a stray garland of hair out of her face and tucking it back up under the brim of her hat. "New Years too perhaps. We'll see how it goes."
"Will I be welcome?" asked Felix.
"You should be a hit," said the Doctor, "if there's one thing Germans are good at - besides classical music and critiques of political economy - it's Christmas."
Saturday, 27 December 2014
Harry Potter and the Popular Consumption of Hegemonic Bourgeois Moral Ideology
Killing people. It's a tricky one, isn't it?
We... (and, in this instance, by the word 'we' I mean that rather narrow band of people who produce and consume the artefacts of the Western narrative culture industries) ... we want to tell ourselves - in those bourgeois morality plays we call entertainment - that killing is WRONG. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The killing curse is an 'Unforgiveable Curse'.
"Make the foundation of this society a man who never would".
Luke can't be won to the Dark Side because he won't kill his father.
"Coward. Every time."
"Stop! I command it! There will be no battle here!"
Etc, etc, etc.
But lookity here... our heroes kill people, or they support the necessity of killing people. Even the 'moral' ones (i.e. the ones who aren't James Bond) do so. Luke is nobly refusing to kill his father even as Han and Leia and Lando are killing loads of Imperial soldiers in the big battles. The Doctor refuses to kill the threatened people of Earth even as the survivors of the Gamestation are fighting and trying to kill Daleks, and Rose solves the whole thing by coming back as the Bad Wolf and committing magical genocide. The Doctor decrees the end of the battle, but relies upon soldiers: the Brigadier, Bambera and Ancelyn... maybe even Ace too... and the Brig saves the world by pumping silver bullets into the Destroyer.
Etc, etc, etc.
Harry Potter never kills anyone. He barely ever fights anyone. But he manages this by hiding in a tent when the war comes, while Neville actually fights the Death Eaters in Hogwarts, and his mates form a resistance cell and an underground radio station. Yet Harry accepts the necessity of killing Voldemort. He passively accepts (as he pasively accepts everything) that killing Voldemort is his destiny. Luckily, as in every other instance (something Voldemort rightly points out), something comes between him and the ugly necessity. Wormtail dies when his own hand strangles him, assorted Death Eaters fall over and accidentally kill themselves and their friends in order to oblige Harry. In the same way, Voldemort gets shot by a wand, acting of its own volition out of loyalty to Harry.
In the Potter stories, killing is categorically wrong, evil, unforgiveable. So the goodies fight the magic-Nazis with jinxes that make you fall over. Luckily, the magic-Nazis also (for some reason) generally refrain from using the killing curse. Meanwhile, Voldemort clearly and explicitly needs killing... and Harry is Chosen to do it... yet he can't do this without either
a) using the unforgiveable killing curse, or
b) getting very lucky (i.e. Voldemort accidentally trips over the hem of his own robes and falls onto the tines of a passing threshing machine).
Luckily, luck always comes to Potter's rescue (as, once again, Voldemort rightly points out), and - through sheer good fortune - there's some complicated business that means Voldemort gets killed by a sentient wand that, like so many expedient creatures before it, stands in front of Our Hero and does all the difficult, icky stuff for him.
(This is in the books only, by the way. In the movies, Neville kills Voldemort by killing the snake - the last Horcrux... an act which weakens Voldemort to the point where he just falls to pieces. Seriously, go and rewatch the last movie. Neville is totally the real Chosen One in movie canon.)
The Harry Potter stories are among the most successful, profitable, influential, widely-read books and widely-watched films produced by the Western culture industries in recent years. Like Star Wars and Doctor Who before them, they've had an enormous impact on millions of people - probably even more so than previous franchises. An entire generation feels that they 'grew up with' Potter his classmates. When some members of that generation took to the streets of London to protest tuition fees in 2011, some of them carried placards saying 'This Never Happened at Hogwarts', and chanted "Expelliarmus!" at the armed riot cops who were kettling and attacking them.
(Parenthetically... this sort of thing bears very little relation to any of the actual political valences or imports of the stories themselves, which are soft-liberal at best, and often highly charged with reactionary implications. There seems very little in any of the stories to suggest that the (unelected) Ministry of Magic's various enforcers might be a threat to democratic protest - at least not until the Ministry gets infected with the foreign virus of Voldemortism. Indeed, there is no democratic protest in the Wizarding World. Rowling's own politics notwithstanding. She seems like a perfectly nice - even, by current standards, conscientious - liberal, outspoken about supporting welfare, the need for rich people to pay their taxes, and the undesirability of persecuting gay people, etc. I give her no kudos for such bare minimums, but it puts her above many in her class. However, for instance, her Potter stories feature precisely one non cis-het character... and he's only gay because the author decreed him so outside of the books... and his gayness is signified via one disastrous relationship that sapped him of all common sense and morality, and which he found so destabilising and immiserating that he never had another romantic or sexual relationship of any kind ever again. Rowling's greedy, big-nosed, "swarthy, clever-faced" goblins are unsettlingly reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semitic ideas, in that they are clearly both evil bankers and also sneaky communists who fail to understand 'human' notions of private property based on trade. The books also feature a race of cutesy, servile elves who love to work and obey, roll their huge bulging eyes, and speak in what is recognisably a kind of parodic pidgin 'black slave dialect', i.e. "I is not doing it Sir!". An entire species of happy drudges, depicted as pickaninny Uncle Toms. Absolutely fucking awful.)
I could go on with that kind of stuff (the books give me plenty of scope)... but the point here isn't really to engage in a point-by-point trashing of the politics of the Potter novels. My point here is that these stories have come to be enormously significant culturally, gaining traction in lots of heads and being co-opted for political rhetoric even in radical or activist situations regardless of their objective content.
As noted above, the moral philosophy underpinning the books is muddled at best. Now, that isn't a tremendous problem. I don't demand that works of fiction rest upon meticulously consistent ethical systems (which, speaking as a reader, is just as well). But, being children's fiction, the books greatly concern themselves with moral issues. (As I say, Western narrative culture is much preoccupied with moralising... and this goes double for cultural artefacts produced for children.) So you'd be forgiven for hoping for a reasonably consistent attitude to the morals being preached, especially since the books are the product of one sole author (to the extent that anything ever can be). But the Potter books do not have a consistent attitude on this. No more so than franchises with huge collaborative input from multiple authors. Actually, that's the important point in all this: Rowling's internal contradictions are not rare but common. They are, in many ways, par for the course. Especially in massively successful cultural artefacts.
One reason why certain works of fiction obtain massive amounts of popular success is that they are relentlessly marketed... but marketing (however despicable and loathsome it may usually be) doesn't exist in a vacuum. People market stuff they think is marketable. Obviously. They market stuff they think people will like. You can't make most people buy a kick in the teeth, even if you spend billions marketing it using the most sophisticated techniques available. There is, undeniably, a sense in which - and a degree to which - capitalism is absolutely right when it says that markets work, and that it (capitalism) gives people what they want. (There are all sorts of problems with this - not least the incorrect assumption that there is a 'thing' called 'The Market', and that it is synonymous with, or an invention of, or impossible without, capitalism... but we'll let all that slide or we'll be here all fucking day.) It's true that the cultural and ideological industries of capitalism - marketing, for instance - can sell people shitty ideas, or get them to acquiesence to shitty things... but that isn't quite the same thing. And often, the successful selling of shitty ideas is reliant upon disguising them, wrapping them up in more pleasant things, or spinning them so that they appeal to our worst tendencies while also flying under the radar of our better instincts. In short: it can be done, but it takes some doing. The telling fact is that capitalism has to devote so much of its time, money and intellectual effort to manufacting such consent and acquiesence.
But, to veer back in the direction of the point... aside from marketing, another reason why certain works of cultural production become hugely popular is because they reflect - in ways that are gratifying, satisfying, flattering, masochistic, clarifying or whatever - widespread ideas, especially about morality. Justice and injustice are essential parts of storytelling, I think. It's in the nature of consuming a story that you think about the moral consequences of what is happening, the justice or injustice of it, the fairness of the distribution of suffering and/or retribution, the possibilities in oneself to act like this or that character, etc. It's a commonplace observation that stories designed to be as marketable as popular tend to be more morally direct and simplistic, at least on the surface. They do it because it works. And it works because we like it. And we like it because it confirms, illustrates, dramatises and flatteringly reflects ideas and intuitions we already have. Even as we are shaped by the narrative commodities we consume, we shape them. They respond to us as we respond to them. It isn't an equal, equitable relationship with both parties on a level playing field, but it is reciprocal. Dialectical, even. The point is that stories concern themselves with justice and injustice - inherently moral ideas - because that's just, kind-of, what they're for (a valid tautology). We, humans, make stories for this purpose. And have done for a very long time. The stories that 'catch on' - the myths that get repeated endlessly, from generation to generation, until they get written down... all the way up to the novels and movies that do billion dollar business - do so partly because they express some widespread moral sense. (Some might turn their noses up at an analysis which puts the financial success of Hollywood blockbusters down to their ability to express moral sentiments that chime with millions... but I want to be clear that I'm not saying audiences or film-makers are necessarily conscious of this, or that the interest of audiences necessarily equates to sympathy, or that their sympathy - when it happens - is always with what the film-makers expect, or that the role of marketing and ideology is at all insignificant, or that Hollywood films are 'improving', or that stories should be 'improving' in order to be 'good'... or any of the other hundreds of ways you could choose to misinterpret what I'm saying.)
As it happens, I do think that film-makers know how important moral questions are in their mass-market dramas. Just look at almost any big budget narrative cultural product. They are all, almost without exception, morality plays of some kind or another. That goes for 12 Years a Slave as much as for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. When George Lucas used to talk about Star Wars, he used to explicitly say that he set out to create a synthesis of modern moral notions in movie form (via Campbell, of course).
So, you probably see where I'm headed with this. One reason why the Potter franchise has been so hugely successful (remembering that in a bourgeois culture the 'success' of a cultural product is, ultimately, its profitability) is because it has, like Star Wars before it, hooked into some very widespread feelings among people in Western (and Westernised) culture about morality. If the purpose of profitable art is to hold the mirror up to culture, something as profitable as Potter must have done so quite well.
The point is that Rowling's difficulties and self-contradictions and inconsistencies on this issue of killing people - and, by extension, the self-contradictions and inconsistencies that other writers get themselves into - mirror and express and dramatise the faultlines in bourgeois morality.
For all my blather, it's actually a very simple point that I'm making: our culture kills people, and relies upon killing people, and is built upon mounds of bodies... yet we enjoy telling ourselves that we think it is wrong to kill. But this impression - that killing people is WRONG in a blanket sense, and that we don't do it - is entirely an impression of the privileged. It is something that we can get away with believing if we are lucky enough to be far enough removed from the filthy realities of exploitation, oppression and mass murder that underpin Western capitalist culture, and/or from any immediate and pressing personal need to fight it.
We... (and, in this instance, by the word 'we' I mean that rather narrow band of people who produce and consume the artefacts of the Western narrative culture industries) ... we want to tell ourselves - in those bourgeois morality plays we call entertainment - that killing is WRONG. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The killing curse is an 'Unforgiveable Curse'.
"Make the foundation of this society a man who never would".
Luke can't be won to the Dark Side because he won't kill his father.
"Coward. Every time."
"Stop! I command it! There will be no battle here!"
Etc, etc, etc.
But lookity here... our heroes kill people, or they support the necessity of killing people. Even the 'moral' ones (i.e. the ones who aren't James Bond) do so. Luke is nobly refusing to kill his father even as Han and Leia and Lando are killing loads of Imperial soldiers in the big battles. The Doctor refuses to kill the threatened people of Earth even as the survivors of the Gamestation are fighting and trying to kill Daleks, and Rose solves the whole thing by coming back as the Bad Wolf and committing magical genocide. The Doctor decrees the end of the battle, but relies upon soldiers: the Brigadier, Bambera and Ancelyn... maybe even Ace too... and the Brig saves the world by pumping silver bullets into the Destroyer.
Etc, etc, etc.
Harry Potter never kills anyone. He barely ever fights anyone. But he manages this by hiding in a tent when the war comes, while Neville actually fights the Death Eaters in Hogwarts, and his mates form a resistance cell and an underground radio station. Yet Harry accepts the necessity of killing Voldemort. He passively accepts (as he pasively accepts everything) that killing Voldemort is his destiny. Luckily, as in every other instance (something Voldemort rightly points out), something comes between him and the ugly necessity. Wormtail dies when his own hand strangles him, assorted Death Eaters fall over and accidentally kill themselves and their friends in order to oblige Harry. In the same way, Voldemort gets shot by a wand, acting of its own volition out of loyalty to Harry.
In the Potter stories, killing is categorically wrong, evil, unforgiveable. So the goodies fight the magic-Nazis with jinxes that make you fall over. Luckily, the magic-Nazis also (for some reason) generally refrain from using the killing curse. Meanwhile, Voldemort clearly and explicitly needs killing... and Harry is Chosen to do it... yet he can't do this without either
a) using the unforgiveable killing curse, or
b) getting very lucky (i.e. Voldemort accidentally trips over the hem of his own robes and falls onto the tines of a passing threshing machine).
Luckily, luck always comes to Potter's rescue (as, once again, Voldemort rightly points out), and - through sheer good fortune - there's some complicated business that means Voldemort gets killed by a sentient wand that, like so many expedient creatures before it, stands in front of Our Hero and does all the difficult, icky stuff for him.
(This is in the books only, by the way. In the movies, Neville kills Voldemort by killing the snake - the last Horcrux... an act which weakens Voldemort to the point where he just falls to pieces. Seriously, go and rewatch the last movie. Neville is totally the real Chosen One in movie canon.)
The Harry Potter stories are among the most successful, profitable, influential, widely-read books and widely-watched films produced by the Western culture industries in recent years. Like Star Wars and Doctor Who before them, they've had an enormous impact on millions of people - probably even more so than previous franchises. An entire generation feels that they 'grew up with' Potter his classmates. When some members of that generation took to the streets of London to protest tuition fees in 2011, some of them carried placards saying 'This Never Happened at Hogwarts', and chanted "Expelliarmus!" at the armed riot cops who were kettling and attacking them.
(Parenthetically... this sort of thing bears very little relation to any of the actual political valences or imports of the stories themselves, which are soft-liberal at best, and often highly charged with reactionary implications. There seems very little in any of the stories to suggest that the (unelected) Ministry of Magic's various enforcers might be a threat to democratic protest - at least not until the Ministry gets infected with the foreign virus of Voldemortism. Indeed, there is no democratic protest in the Wizarding World. Rowling's own politics notwithstanding. She seems like a perfectly nice - even, by current standards, conscientious - liberal, outspoken about supporting welfare, the need for rich people to pay their taxes, and the undesirability of persecuting gay people, etc. I give her no kudos for such bare minimums, but it puts her above many in her class. However, for instance, her Potter stories feature precisely one non cis-het character... and he's only gay because the author decreed him so outside of the books... and his gayness is signified via one disastrous relationship that sapped him of all common sense and morality, and which he found so destabilising and immiserating that he never had another romantic or sexual relationship of any kind ever again. Rowling's greedy, big-nosed, "swarthy, clever-faced" goblins are unsettlingly reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semitic ideas, in that they are clearly both evil bankers and also sneaky communists who fail to understand 'human' notions of private property based on trade. The books also feature a race of cutesy, servile elves who love to work and obey, roll their huge bulging eyes, and speak in what is recognisably a kind of parodic pidgin 'black slave dialect', i.e. "I is not doing it Sir!". An entire species of happy drudges, depicted as pickaninny Uncle Toms. Absolutely fucking awful.)
I could go on with that kind of stuff (the books give me plenty of scope)... but the point here isn't really to engage in a point-by-point trashing of the politics of the Potter novels. My point here is that these stories have come to be enormously significant culturally, gaining traction in lots of heads and being co-opted for political rhetoric even in radical or activist situations regardless of their objective content.
As noted above, the moral philosophy underpinning the books is muddled at best. Now, that isn't a tremendous problem. I don't demand that works of fiction rest upon meticulously consistent ethical systems (which, speaking as a reader, is just as well). But, being children's fiction, the books greatly concern themselves with moral issues. (As I say, Western narrative culture is much preoccupied with moralising... and this goes double for cultural artefacts produced for children.) So you'd be forgiven for hoping for a reasonably consistent attitude to the morals being preached, especially since the books are the product of one sole author (to the extent that anything ever can be). But the Potter books do not have a consistent attitude on this. No more so than franchises with huge collaborative input from multiple authors. Actually, that's the important point in all this: Rowling's internal contradictions are not rare but common. They are, in many ways, par for the course. Especially in massively successful cultural artefacts.
One reason why certain works of fiction obtain massive amounts of popular success is that they are relentlessly marketed... but marketing (however despicable and loathsome it may usually be) doesn't exist in a vacuum. People market stuff they think is marketable. Obviously. They market stuff they think people will like. You can't make most people buy a kick in the teeth, even if you spend billions marketing it using the most sophisticated techniques available. There is, undeniably, a sense in which - and a degree to which - capitalism is absolutely right when it says that markets work, and that it (capitalism) gives people what they want. (There are all sorts of problems with this - not least the incorrect assumption that there is a 'thing' called 'The Market', and that it is synonymous with, or an invention of, or impossible without, capitalism... but we'll let all that slide or we'll be here all fucking day.) It's true that the cultural and ideological industries of capitalism - marketing, for instance - can sell people shitty ideas, or get them to acquiesence to shitty things... but that isn't quite the same thing. And often, the successful selling of shitty ideas is reliant upon disguising them, wrapping them up in more pleasant things, or spinning them so that they appeal to our worst tendencies while also flying under the radar of our better instincts. In short: it can be done, but it takes some doing. The telling fact is that capitalism has to devote so much of its time, money and intellectual effort to manufacting such consent and acquiesence.
But, to veer back in the direction of the point... aside from marketing, another reason why certain works of cultural production become hugely popular is because they reflect - in ways that are gratifying, satisfying, flattering, masochistic, clarifying or whatever - widespread ideas, especially about morality. Justice and injustice are essential parts of storytelling, I think. It's in the nature of consuming a story that you think about the moral consequences of what is happening, the justice or injustice of it, the fairness of the distribution of suffering and/or retribution, the possibilities in oneself to act like this or that character, etc. It's a commonplace observation that stories designed to be as marketable as popular tend to be more morally direct and simplistic, at least on the surface. They do it because it works. And it works because we like it. And we like it because it confirms, illustrates, dramatises and flatteringly reflects ideas and intuitions we already have. Even as we are shaped by the narrative commodities we consume, we shape them. They respond to us as we respond to them. It isn't an equal, equitable relationship with both parties on a level playing field, but it is reciprocal. Dialectical, even. The point is that stories concern themselves with justice and injustice - inherently moral ideas - because that's just, kind-of, what they're for (a valid tautology). We, humans, make stories for this purpose. And have done for a very long time. The stories that 'catch on' - the myths that get repeated endlessly, from generation to generation, until they get written down... all the way up to the novels and movies that do billion dollar business - do so partly because they express some widespread moral sense. (Some might turn their noses up at an analysis which puts the financial success of Hollywood blockbusters down to their ability to express moral sentiments that chime with millions... but I want to be clear that I'm not saying audiences or film-makers are necessarily conscious of this, or that the interest of audiences necessarily equates to sympathy, or that their sympathy - when it happens - is always with what the film-makers expect, or that the role of marketing and ideology is at all insignificant, or that Hollywood films are 'improving', or that stories should be 'improving' in order to be 'good'... or any of the other hundreds of ways you could choose to misinterpret what I'm saying.)
As it happens, I do think that film-makers know how important moral questions are in their mass-market dramas. Just look at almost any big budget narrative cultural product. They are all, almost without exception, morality plays of some kind or another. That goes for 12 Years a Slave as much as for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. When George Lucas used to talk about Star Wars, he used to explicitly say that he set out to create a synthesis of modern moral notions in movie form (via Campbell, of course).
So, you probably see where I'm headed with this. One reason why the Potter franchise has been so hugely successful (remembering that in a bourgeois culture the 'success' of a cultural product is, ultimately, its profitability) is because it has, like Star Wars before it, hooked into some very widespread feelings among people in Western (and Westernised) culture about morality. If the purpose of profitable art is to hold the mirror up to culture, something as profitable as Potter must have done so quite well.
The point is that Rowling's difficulties and self-contradictions and inconsistencies on this issue of killing people - and, by extension, the self-contradictions and inconsistencies that other writers get themselves into - mirror and express and dramatise the faultlines in bourgeois morality.
For all my blather, it's actually a very simple point that I'm making: our culture kills people, and relies upon killing people, and is built upon mounds of bodies... yet we enjoy telling ourselves that we think it is wrong to kill. But this impression - that killing people is WRONG in a blanket sense, and that we don't do it - is entirely an impression of the privileged. It is something that we can get away with believing if we are lucky enough to be far enough removed from the filthy realities of exploitation, oppression and mass murder that underpin Western capitalist culture, and/or from any immediate and pressing personal need to fight it.
Friday, 12 December 2014
Frankensound
Yes, I'm on Pex Lives again. (I know, it seems like I'm trying to invade the podcast... but you have to remember that, from the point of view of me and Kevin and James, the last one I did was in June.)
This time I'm guesting in a special Christmas bonus episode alongside Gene Mayes, and chatting about the Hammer Frankenstein movies. Download it here.
This is a good, fun episode... and I think I'm better on this than I was on the last one (more relaxed, as James noticed).
This time I'm guesting in a special Christmas bonus episode alongside Gene Mayes, and chatting about the Hammer Frankenstein movies. Download it here.
This is a good, fun episode... and I think I'm better on this than I was on the last one (more relaxed, as James noticed).
Sunday, 7 December 2014
Now with Sound!
You know the brilliant Pex Lives podcast, right? Well I was a guest on it back in June, alongside my online buddy, the equally brilliant Josh Marsfelder, writer of Vaka Rangi (amongst other things).
Don't remember that happening? That's because the podcast got swallowed into the echoing void...
But it's been found! Or perhaps I should say 'reconstructed'. Yeah, like 'Power of the Daleks', only better.
Me, Josh, and the aimiable and clever two-headed gestalt entity which runs the podcast, Kevames (or sometimes Jamevin - depends on its mood swings) talked about the TV Movie. But don't let that put you off.
I'm largely responsible for the podcast being temporarily stranded in conceptual space through my mountainish technical ineptitude. Mind you, Josh claims the same thing, as does James. The only person not claiming responsibility for the fiasco is Kevin, which leads me to think he's probably secretly to blame somehow.
However we apportion culpability, the thing has been rescued from oblivion by people other than me working very hard (labour doesn't have any value, does it?) and here it is, or here, ready to download.
Hear my actual voice saying things! Hear me make half-formed points that I now refuse to stand-by, and interrupt people, and generally witter!
I had a blast. I hope you like it too.
Don't remember that happening? That's because the podcast got swallowed into the echoing void...
But it's been found! Or perhaps I should say 'reconstructed'. Yeah, like 'Power of the Daleks', only better.
Me, Josh, and the aimiable and clever two-headed gestalt entity which runs the podcast, Kevames (or sometimes Jamevin - depends on its mood swings) talked about the TV Movie. But don't let that put you off.
I'm largely responsible for the podcast being temporarily stranded in conceptual space through my mountainish technical ineptitude. Mind you, Josh claims the same thing, as does James. The only person not claiming responsibility for the fiasco is Kevin, which leads me to think he's probably secretly to blame somehow.
However we apportion culpability, the thing has been rescued from oblivion by people other than me working very hard (labour doesn't have any value, does it?) and here it is, or here, ready to download.
Hear my actual voice saying things! Hear me make half-formed points that I now refuse to stand-by, and interrupt people, and generally witter!
I had a blast. I hope you like it too.
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