Andrew Hickey

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May 20th, 2014: Last night I dreamed that it was my job to describe how it feels to be a dog, but then I woke up into a world where it's my job to make dinosaurs talk in comics! I feel like I traded up!! – Ryan

That BBC coverage eh?



I think we can all be agreed that the #Vote2014 coverage of local council elections left a little to be desired. An over emphasis on the situation with UKIP, the audacity of sending reporters to clearly UKIP friendly areas and being flabbergasted at the fact that UKIP is something people talk about when asked about the elections, and generally spending their air time talking to politicians about what the public must be thinking based on the votes coming in rather than...you know...asking the public. At one point we genuinely had a two labour figures being interviewed against each other about the state of politics. Crazy.

However I'm sensing around social media that people are firmly still in the "denial" stage of grief when it comes to UKIP. You may argue with the term "earthquake", but it is utterly delusional to not agree that UKIP are facing a frantic surge in popularity every time an election rolls around. The reason why some are calling this an "earthquake" or a shake up of politics, or the beginning of four party politics, is that UKIP support is spreading (outside of London) and entrenching.

In 2012, the first real year of local "success" for UKIP they didn't have enough support to warrant giving them their own spot in the "projected national share" projections that the BBC creates from the councils it gets full results for. They polled 13% in the few places they stood, but this wasn't a wide enough base to give them any meaningful peg on the national vote share ladder.

Then came 2013, and a whopping 23% prediction of the national vote if this had been a general election.



However, yesterday comes and UKIP are "only" pegged at 17% in a projected national share, a full 4% above the Liberal Democrats and in third place. By any standards, in an election where such a large amount of the country's local councillors are elected, this is a big deal.



Cue "The Mass Denial". "Their support is dropping!" they say. "This doesn't matter because turnout is so low!" they say. "It's just a protest vote, it'll go away!" they say.



One of the sad things about politics, I find, is that generally people vote the same whether it's 20% of people voting or 70%. There are of course not insignificant variations as different interest groups and political groups are brought into the fold by higher turnout, and higher turnout has the general effect of moving the pointer from one direction (usually the disaffected protestors) to another (the prgamatic and loyal). You can see it from previous projected national shares of the vote, taking what people do on a turnout of 35% nationally can translate into a fairly decent idea of what would happen at 60-70% turnout.

Look at 2009. Lib Dems are a viable third place party by this point, however they were also seen as a party propped up by protest votes. The BBC gave them a projected national share of 28% compared to Labour's 23%, with the Tories on a downward trend at 38%. The actual 2010 result? Tories 36%, Labour 29% and Lib Dems on 23%.

Labour voters turned up at the General Election in a way they didn't at local elections, and by contrast Lib Dems fared worse on vote share nationally with their MPs than their councillors. Is this the key to showing that UKIP's support is a protest vote like Lib Dems? That their 17% will fall to 12% or below?

Perhaps, or perhaps because demographically the Lib Dems and UKIP are mirror images of each other, with UKIP commanding a legion of fringe supporters that are a) Motivated for wholesale change rather than just no tuition fees and b) part of a generation that holds a sense of civic pride in voting, the chances of their share dropping quite so high as that of the Lib Dems circa 2009-2010?

But what of this idea their support is dwindling? A fantasy, as far as I'm concerned.



In 2013, the first year where the BBC deemed it necessary to give UKIP their own slot on the projected national share, was a year where many councils were electing their councillors, but not London, not Wales, not a number of larger areas and cities. Previously UKIP had been part of "Others" which had a share of 15%, but were left with 9% when UKIP moved out.

Going from around 5-6% as part of the "Others" to 23% was always a monumental leap. It was likely questioned at the time by the very people now using it as gospel to show that UKIP are "on the slide" rather than on a surge.



But it didn't include areas that we now know are not very UKIP friendly, predictably areas with higher proportions of migrants and diverse communities. If you take the results from places like London away this notion that UKIP have done worse than in 2013 slips away very easily. They have, more accurately, performed about the same as last year if not a little better.

Their council seat wins are consistent with 2013, and in seats that they didn't win they've started to put themselves in 3rd or even 2nd spots. They've not won any councils, but quite frankly it would be a thunderous earthquake if, in the space of two years, UKIP gained control of a council let alone more than one.

Then there is national polling.



Opinion polls are fairly reliable. People that aren't seeing the results they want like to believe they're not, and people that are seeing results they want maybe put a little bit too much stock in individual ones. Take the Greens. They feel they're surging, despite their opinion levels being fairly consistent except into the run up of the EU elections for years (and in the EU polling they're doing no better than 5 years ago). But I digress.

In 2012 ICM (in my opinion the most accurate pollster) put UKIP around the local election dates on 3-4%. In 2013 at the same point of the year it was 18%, though this was a clear outlier where a support level of 7-9% is more accurate, and in 2014 is is keeping around 9-11%.



This is not the trend of a party losing support, it is one of a steady rise in support of nearly 10% in two years, though we should wait a few more months for these particular elections (and the outliers they seem to generate) to see how much more this could potentially rise. It's also worth noting that these spikes in support really seem to translate in to spikes in voting. In my opinion it's not all coincidence their support was around 18% in the lead up to the 2013 local elections and the 17% they're projected right now.

UKIP are here, and they may not realistically be much more of a party than the Greens are as it stands, but they are also showing all the signs of taking this seriously. The BNP were just a bunch of ranty, illiterate, racists that managed to somehow pool enough brainpower to form a party. UKIP are already talking, quite sensibly, about how they're going to target seats to grow their support, to grow their volunteer base...to do all the things a serious political party does to move from being a protest party into one that retains consistent base levels of support.

Best case scenario at the moment is that their support plateaus while the other parties work out a way to mitigate the effects of the UKIP narrative, but with Labour seemingly happy to play deferentially to UKIP as if they have the answers, and Tories not quite sure whether they should be attacking UKIP or trying to show people that they're not that different from them, I'm not sure that's a guaranteed outcome either.

Sitting and pretending the rise of UKIP isn't happening, or being anal over whether or not this constitutes an "earthquake" or not is a waste of effort. The question right now is if the large number of people not voting feel proportionally any different to the proportion of people that voted, and for the other parties to find the solution to getting those usually non-voting people into the voting booths...and to find that solution fast because UKIP seem to have got a solution all of their own and they're already using it.

Many Liberal Democrats, including Liberator Collective members Tim McNally in Southwark and John Bryant in Camden, will be going through that pit-of-the-stomach sensation where they try and work out exactly who is to blame for their losing their council seat.

The main headlines today.

THE BBC NEWS DIVISION HAS TAKEN OVER OWNERSHIP OF OBSCURE DOCTOR WHO BLOG SHABOGAN GRAFFITI

"The blog will now be run according to proper BBC guidelines of impartiality," said that lying Zionist shitsack James Harding, head of BBC News.

In other news...

UKIP SURGE FORWARD AND ONWARDS TO CERTAIN FORWARD MARCHING MARCH OF ONWARD SURGING SURGENESS AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI.

The BBC Newsroom is reporting that despite there being no sentiments ever expressed on Shabogan Graffiti that a Ukipper would ever find acceptable, UKIP have broken through with a breakthrough on Shabogan Graffiti and are now surging forward and ahead to breakthroughs and surges on the unpopular blog.

"Apparently the vast majority of the British electorate do not read Shabogan Graffiti," said a hairdo on top of a suit behind a desk, "but even so, the fact that UKIP have now broken through and surged across the blog shows clearly that the British public think UKIP are a force to be reckoned with and a reckon to be forced with and surging and breaking through and getting the mainstream establishment parties running scared."

Finally...

BBC ANNOUNCES NEW SERIES OF POSTS ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI, TO BE ENTITLED 'IMMIGRATION: ASKING THE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS THAT MOST WHITE WORKING CLASS PEOPLE WANT ANSWERED BUT WHICH THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS NAZIS REFUSE ANY OF US TO TALK ABOUT'.

Andrew Marr is 412 years old.

[Trigger warning for deliberately provoking horror about graduates' real-world post-college prospects]
[Epistemic status: intended as persuasive speech, may somewhat overstate case]

Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to have been invited to speak here at the great University of [mumble]. Go Wildcats, Spartans, or Eagles, as the case may be!

I apologize if what I have to say to you sounds a little unpolished. I was called in on very short notice after your original choice for graduation speaker, Mr. Steven L. Carter, had his invitation to speak rescinded due to his offensive and quite honestly outrageous opinions. Let me say in no uncertain terms that I totally condemn him and everything he stands for, and that I am glad to see the University of [mumble] taking a strong stand against this sort of thing.

Ladies and gentlemen, probably the most famous graduation speech in history was Kurt Vonnegut’s “Wear Sunscreen” address. I’m sure you’ve all heard about it. He told an MIT class that they should wear sunscreen. Because for all he knew any more substantial advice he gave might be wrong, but that at least was on a firm evidential basis.

Well, I come here before you to explain that there is now serious controversy in the dermatological community. A 1995 paper found that people who used more sunscreen had a much higher risk of malignant melanoma, the most dangerous type of skin cancer. Eight years later, a review article claimed that the original paper was confounded by fairness of skin, and that likely the relationship between sunscreen use and melanoma is zero. But the story was further complicated by the finding that sunscreen use may increase cancers of the internal organs, either through vitamin D dependent or some vitamin D independent pathways. My understanding is that a majority of dermatologists are still in favor of sunscreen, but that the issue is by no means settled.

But think about what the disagreement means. One of the smartest men in America came before an auditorium just like this, and said that there was only one item of advice of which he was completely certain – that you should wear sunscreen. Absolutely certain. And years later, we know that not only is this a very complicated question on which no certainty is yet possible – but it may very well be that if you follow his advice, you will get cancer and die.

Sometimes the things everybody knows everybody knows just aren’t true. Like, did you know Vonnegut never wrote a graduation speech about sunscreen at all?

So with this spirit of questioning assumptions in mind, I want to ask you a question. Today many of you will be completing your education. Sure, some of you are going on to graduate or professional training, but it is clearly the end of an era. Seventeen years, from kindergarten to the present, and I want to ask you:

Is education worth it?

This sounds like the introduction to every college graduation speech ever. The speaker will ask if education is worth it, say of course it is because something something the human condition, and everyone will cheer and head off to the reception. So in order to keep you on your toes, I want to make the opposite point. What if education, as you understand it – public or private or charter schooling from age four or five all the way to university as young adults – is, on net, a waste of your time and money?

In order to move beyond platitudes in evaluate whether education is worthwhile – to give it the same kind of fair hearing we would want to give sunscreen – we need to list out some of the costs and benefits. Of benefits, two stand out clearly. The philosophical benefits of feeling connected to the beauty of mathematics, the passion of the humanities, the great historical traditions. And the practical benefits of being able to get a job and afford nice things like food and shelter.

We will start with philosophy. Human knowledge is pretty great. Your life has been enriched with the ideas of brilliant thinkers, of giants upon whose shoulders you might one day hope to stand. Isn’t this enough?

But as 86% of you know, you can’t just observe an experimental group has experienced an effect and attribute it to the experimental intervention. You have to see if other people in a control group got the same benefit for less work.

What would be the control group for school? Home-schoolers do much better than those who attend public or private schools by nearly any measure. But this is unfair; it’s what scientists call an “active control”. What we really need to do is compare you to people who got no instruction at all.

It’s illegal not to educate a child, so our control group will be hard to find. But perhaps the best bet will be the “unschooling” movement, a group of parents who think school is oppressive and damaging. They tell the government they’re home-schooling their children but actually just let them do whatever they want. They may teach their kid something if the child wants to be taught, otherwise they will leave them pretty much alone.

And this is really hard to study, because they’re a highly self-selected group and there aren’t very many of them. The only study I could find on the movement only had n = 12, and although it tried as hard as it could to compare them to schoolchildren matched for race and family income level and parent education and all that good stuff I’m sure there’s some weirdness that slipped through the cracks. Still, it’s all we’ve got.

So, do these children do worse than their peers at public school?

Yes, they do.

By one grade level.

About college we still know very little. But if you’d stayed out of public school and stayed home and played games and maybe asked your parents some questions, then by the time your friends were graduating twelfth grade, you would have the equivalent of an eleventh-grade education.

Another intriguing clue here is Louis Benezet’s experiment with mathematics instruction. Benezet, an early 20th century superintendent of schools, wondered whether cramming mathematics into kids at an early age had a detrimental effect. He decreed that in some of the schools in his district, there would be no math instruction until grade six. He found that within a year, these sixth graders had caught up with their peers in traditional schools, and furthermore that they were able to think much more logically about math problems – figure out what was going on rather than desperately trying to multiply and divide all the numbers in the problem by one another. If Benezet’s results hold true – and on careful reading they are hard to doubt – any math education before grade six is useless at best. And it’s hard to resist the urge to generalize to other subjects and children even older still.

Why is it so easy for the unschooled to keep up with their better educated brethren? My guess is that it’s because very little learning goes on at school at all. The proponents of education speak of feeling connected to the beauty of mathematics, the passion of the humanities, and the great historical traditions. But how many of the children they spit out can prove one of Euclid’s theorems? How many have been exposed to the Canterbury Tales? How many have experienced the sublime beauty of the Parthenon?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, by the way. According to the general survey of knowledge among college students, 3.3% know who Euclid was, 7.6% know who wrote Canterbury, and a full 15% know what city the Parthenon’s in.

36% of high school students know that an atom is bigger than an electron, rather than vice versa. But a full 59% of college students know the same. That’s a whole nine percent better than chance. On one of the most basic facts about the fundamental entities that make up everything in existence.

“But knowledge isn’t about names and dates!” No, but names and dates are the parts that are easy to measure, and it’s a pretty good bet that if you don’t know what city the Parthenon’s in you probably haven’t absorbed the full genius of the Greek architectural tradition. Anyone who’s never heard of Chaucer probably doesn’t have strong opinions on the classics of Middle English literature.

So in contradiction to the claim that education is necessary to teach beautiful and elegant knowledge, I maintain first that nearly nobody in the educational system picks this up anyway, that people who don’t get any formal education at all pick it up nearly as much of it, and that people not exposed to it as children will, if they decide to learn it as adults, pick it up quickly and easily and without the heartbreak of trying to cram it into the underdeveloped head of a seven year old.

What about the claim that education is practically useful for getting a job and making money?

Even more than most young people, you’ve had the privilege of getting to watch your dreams implode in real time right before your eyes. About fifteen percent of you will be some variant of unemployed straight out of college. Another ten percent will find something part-time. And another forty or so percent will be underemployed, working as waiters or clerks or baristas or something else that uses zero percent of the knowledge you’ve worked so hard to accumulate. The remaining third of you who get something vaguely resembling the job you signed up for will still have to deal with wages that have stagnated over the last decade even as working hours increased and average student debt nearly doubled.

But don’t worry, I’m sure the nice folks at Chase-Bear-Goldman-Sallie-Manhattan-Stearns-Sachs-Mae-FEDGOV will be happy to forgive your debt if you mention you weren’t entirely happy with the purchase. You did hold out for the satisfaction-guaranteed offer, right? No? Uh oh.

As bad as the job market is, staying in school looks worse. Economists warn that attending law school is the worst career decision you can make, so much so that newly graduated lawyers have nothing do to but sue law schools for not warning them against attending and established firms offer an Anything But Law School Scholarship to raise awareness of the problem. Doctors are so uniformly unhappy that they are committing suicide in record numbers and nine out of ten would warn young people against going into medicine. Graduate school has always been an iffy bet, but now the ratio of Ph. D applicants to open tenure track positions has hit triple digits, with the vast majority ending up as miserable adjunct professors who juggle multiple part time jobs and end up making as much as a Starbucks barista but without the health insurance.

I’d like to thank whoever figured out how to include URLs in speeches, by the way. That was the best invention.

But here I cannot honestly disagree with the conventional assessment that going to school raises your earning power. As bad as you will have it, everyone who didn’t graduate college still has it much, much worse. All the economic indicators agree with the signs from the desolate wasteland that was once our industrial heartland: they are doomed. Their wages are not stagnating but actively declining, their unemployment rate is a positively Greek thirty-five percent, and prospects for changing that are few and far between. Some economists blame globalization, which makes it easy to outsource manufacturing and other manual labor to the Chinese. Others blame technology, noting that many of the old well-paying blue-collar jobs are done not by foreigners but by machines. Both trends are set to increase, turning even more factory workers, truck drivers, and warehouse-stockers into burger-flippers, Wal-Mart greeters, and hollow-eyed unemployed.

But don’t let your schadenfreude get the better of you. Twenty years from now that’s going to be you. Sure, right now machines can only do the easy stuff, and the world isn’t interconnected enough to let foreigners do anything really subtle for us. But lawyers are already feeling the pinch of software that auto-generates contracts, and programmers are already feeling the pinch of Indians who will work for half the pay and email their code to Silicon Valley the next morning. You don’t need to invent a robo-drafter to put engineers out of business, just drafting software so effective it allows one engineer to do the work of three. And although there are half-hearted efforts to stop it, it seems more and more like King Canute trying to turn back a tide made of hundred dollar bills.

Once machines can do everything we can better and cheaper, the inevitable end result is employment for a few geniuses who invent and run the machines, immense profits for the capitalists who own the machines, and what happens to everyone else better left unspoken.

“Is this a vision of what shall be, or of what might be only?” Well, a visionaries as diverse as Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman have proposed something called a Basic Income Guarantee. When society becomes so advanced that it produces more than enough for everybody – but also so advanced that most individuals below genius level have little to contribute and no way of earning money – everyone should get a yearly salary just for existing. Think welfare, except that it goes to everybody, there’s no stigma, and it’s more than enough to live on. This titanic promise has run up against a giant iceberg with BUT HOW WOULD WE PAY FOR IT written in big red letters on the front. If we cancelled all existing welfare and entitlement programs – which makes sense if we’re giving everyone enough money to live comfortably on, we would only free up enough money together for a universal income of $5,800. I don’t know if you can live on that, but I’d hate to have to try.

But we’ve gotten off track. We were counting the benefits of formal education. We did not do so well in trying to prove that it left you more knowledgeable, but it did seem like it had some practical value in getting you a little bit more money. With your shiny college degree, you can confidently assert “I’ve got mine”, just as long as you take care not to notice the increasingly distant hordes of manual laborers or the statistics showing that the yours you’ve got is less and less every year.

What of the costs of education? What have you lost out on?

Well, first about twenty thousand hours of your youth. That’s okay. You weren’t using that golden time of perfect health and halcyon memories when you had more true capacity for creativity and imagination and happiness than you ever will again anyway. If you hadn’t had your teachers to tell you that you needed to be making a collage showing your feelings about The Scarlet Letter, you probably would have wasted your childhood seeing a world in a grain of sand or Heaven in a wild flower or something dumb like that.

I’m more interested in the financial side of it. At $11,000 average per pupil spending per year times thirteen years plus various preschool and college subsidies, the government spends $155,000 on the kindergarten-through-college education of the average American.

Inspired by a tweet: what if the government had taken this figure (adjusted for inflation) and invested it in the stock market at the moment of your birth? Today when you graduate college, they remove it from the stock market, put it in a low-risk bond, put a certain percent of the interest from that bond into keeping up with inflation, and hand you the rest each year as a basic income guarantee. How much would you have?

And I calculate that the answer would be $15,000 a year, adjusted for interest. We can add the $5,800 basic income guarantee we could already afford onto that for about $20,000 a year, for everyone. Black, white, man, woman, employed, unemployed, abled, disabled, rich, poor. Welcome to the real world, it’s dangerous to go alone, take this. What, you thought we were going to throw you out to sink or swim in a world where if you die you die in real life? Come on, we’re not that cruel.

So when we ask whether your education is worth it, we have to compare what you got – an education that puts you one grade level above the uneducated and which has informed 3.3% of you who Euclid is – to what you could have gotten. 20,000 hours of your youth to play, study, learn to play the violin, whatever. And $20,000 a year, sweat-free.

$20,000 a year isn’t much. The average mid-career salary of an average college graduate is nearly triple that – $55,000. By the numbers your education looks pretty good. But numbers can be deceiving.

Consider the life you have to look forward to, making your $55,000. The exact profession that makes closest to that number is a paralegal, so let’s go with that. You get a job as a paralegal in a prestigious Manhattan law firm. You can’t afford to live in Manhattan, but you scrounge together enough money for a cramped apartment in Brooklyn, which costs you about $2000 a month rent. Every morning you wake up at 7:45, get on the forty-five minute subway ride to Manhattan, and make it to work by your 9:00 AM starting time. Your boss is a kind of nasty lawyer who is himself upset that he can’t pay back his law school debt and yells at you all day. By the time you get back home around 6, you’re too exhausted to do much besides watch some TV. You don’t really have time to meet guys – I’m assuming you’re a woman here, sixty percent of you are, I blame the patriarchy – so you put out a personal ad on Craigslist and after a while find someone you like. You get married after a year; your honeymoon is in Vermont because his company won’t give him enough time off to go any further.

You have two point four kids, and realize you’ve got to move to a better part of town because your school district sucks. Combined with your student debt, that puts a big strain on the finances and you don’t have enough to pay for child care. Eventually you find a place that will do it for cheap, and although it looks kind of dirty and you’re shocked when Junior calls you a “puta” which isn’t even a proper English curse word the price is right and they’re the only people who will accept four tenths of a kid. The older kids keep asking you and Dad for help with homework, which you can’t give because you haven’t really had time to keep up with your math and grammar and so on skills, what with the paralegal job and the television-watching taking up all your time. So you tell them to ask their teacher for extra help, which their teacher doesn’t give because she’s got forty other kids asking for the same thing and only twenty-four hours in a day. Despite all of this Junior gets into college and you sure haven’t saved up the money to put him through there tuition has spiraled to twelve gazillion dollars by this point and Chase-Bear-Goldman-Sallie-Manhattan-Stearns-Sachs-Mae-FEDGOV can’t lend him that because gazillion isn’t even a real number, and ohmigod what if Junior ends up one of those high school graduates with the Greek-level unemployment rates standing forlornly in front of a decaying factory in the Rust Belt? Worse, what if he ends up living with you? You beg him to go back to the bank and offer to pay whatever interest rates they ask. And so the cycle begins anew.

Or consider your life on a $20,000 a year income guarantee. No longer tied down to a job, you can live wherever you want. I love the mountains. Let’s live in a cabin in Colorado, way up in the Rockies. You can find stunningly beautiful ones for $500 a month – freed from the mad rush to get into scarce urban or suburban areas with good school districts, housing is actually really cheap. So there you are in the Rockies, maybe with a used car to take you to Denver when you want to see people or go to a show, but otherwise all on your own except for the deer and squirrels. You wake up at nine, cook yourself a healthy breakfast, then take a long jog out in the forest. By the time you come back, you’ve got a lot of interesting thoughts, and you talk about them with the dozens of online friends you cultivate close relationships with and whom you can take a road trip and visit any time you feel like. Eventually you’re talked out, and you curl up with a good book – this week you’re trying to make it through Aristotle on aesthetics. The topic interests you since you’re learning to paint – you’ve always wanted to be an artist, and with all the time in the world and stunning views to inspire you, you’re making good progress. Freed from the need to appeal to customers or critics, you are able to develop your own original style, and you take heart in the words of the old Kipling poem:

And none but the Master will praise them
And none but the Master will blame
And no one will work for money
And no one will work for fame
But each for the joy of the working
Each on his separate star
To draw the thing as he sees it
For the God of things as they are

One of the fans of your work is a cute girl – this time I’m assuming you’re a man, I’m sure over the past four years you’ve learned some choice words for people who do that. You date and get married. She comes to live with you – she’s also getting $20,000 a year from the government in place of an education, so now you’re up to $40,000, which is actually very close to the US median household income. You have two point four kids. With both of you at home full time, you see their first steps, hear their first words, get to see them as they begin to develop their own personalities. They start seeming a little lonely for other kids their own age, so with a sad good-bye to your mountain, you move to a bigger house in a little town on the shores of a lake in Montana. There’s no schooling for them, but you teach them to read, first out of children’s books, later out of something a little harder like Harry Potter, and then finally you turn them loose in your library. Your oldest devours your collection of Aristotle and tells you she wants to be a philosopher when she grows up. Evenings they go swimming, or play stickball with the other kids in town.

When they reach college age, your daughter is so thrilled at the opportunity to learn from her intellectual heroes that she goes to Chase-Bear-Goldman-Sallie-Manhattan-Stearns-Sachs-Mae-FEDGOV and asks for a loan. They’re happy to give her fifteen thousand, which is all college costs nowadays – only the people who are really interested in learning feel the need to go nowadays, and supply so outpaces demand that prices are driven down. She makes it into Yale (unsurprising given how much better home-schooled students do) studies philosophy, but finds she likes technology better. She decides to become an engineer, and becomes part of the base of wealthy professionals helping fund the income guarantee for everyone else. She marries a nice man after making sure he’s willing to stay home and take care of the children – she’s not crazy, she doesn’t want to send them to some kind of institution

Your younger son, on the other hand, is a little intellectually disabled and can’t read above a third-grade level. That’s not a big problem for you or for him. When he grows older, he moves to Hawaii where he spends most of his time swimming in the ocean and by all accounts enjoys himself very much.

You’re happy your son will be financially secure for the rest of his life, but on a broader scale, you’re happy that no one around you has to live in fear of getting fired, or is struggling to make ends meet, or is stuck in the Rust Belt with a useless skill set. Every so often, you call your daughter and thank her for helping design the robots that do most of the hard work.

Would you like to swing on a star? Carry moonbeams home in a jar? And be better off than you are? Or would you like to get a formal education?

We’re finally getting back to the point now. I’m sorry it’s taken this long. I can see the Dean of Students checking her watch over there with a worried look on her face. I think she’s worried I’m trying to filibuster your graduation. You know legally if I can keep speaking until midnight tonight, the graduation is cancelled and you have to stay in school another year? It’s true. Those are the rules.

Because I don’t want to talk about the very broad social question of whether Education the concept is worth it to Society as a concept. I want to ask you, standing here today, was your education worth it?

Because this is a college graduation speech, and I am legally mandated to offer some advice, and the specific advice I give will be tailored to your response.

Some of you will say yes, my education was worth it. I am the 3.3%! I know who Euclid was and I understand the sublime beauty of geometry. I don’t think I would have been exposed to it, or had the grit to keep studying it, if I hadn’t been here surrounded by equally curious peers, under the instruction of enthusiastic professors. This revelation was worth losing my cabin in Colorado, worth resigning myself to the daily grind and the constant lurking fear of failure. I claim it all.

And to you my advice is: if you’ve sacrificed everything for knowledge, don’t forget that. When you are a paralegal in Brooklyn, and you get home from work, and you are very tired, and you want to curl up in front of the TV and watch reality shows until you are numb, remind yourself that you value knowledge above everything else, that you will seek intellectual beauty though the world perish, and read a book or something. Or take a class at a community college. Anything other than declaring knowledge your supreme value but becoming a boob.

Others of you will say yes, my education was worth it. Not because of what I learned about ukulele or eucalyptus or whatever, but because of the friends I made here, the proud University of [mumble] spirit of camaraderie, which I will carry forth my entire life.

And to you my advice is similar: if you’ve sacrificed everything for friendship, don’t forget that. When you are a paralegal in Brooklyn, or a market analyst in Seattle, or God forbid an intern in Michigan, and you get home from work, and you are very tired, and you want to curl up in front of your computer and check Reddit, remind yourself of the friends you made here and give them a call. See how they’re doing. Write them a Christmas card, especially if it is December. Anything other than declaring friendship your supreme value and drifting out of touch.

Others of you will say yes, my education was worth it. Not because of what I learned about the Eucharist or eucre or whatever, but because of the connections I made, the network of alumni who will be giving me a leg up in whatever I choose to pursue.

And to you my advice is, again, similar. If you’ve sacrificed everything for ambition, be ambitious as hell. When you are a paralegal in Brooklyn or whatever, claw your way to the top, stay there, and use it to do something important. If you’ve sacrificed everything for ambition, don’t you dare stop at middle manager.

Others of you will say yes, my education was worth it. Not because of what I learned about yucca or the Yucatan or whatever, but because it helped me learn civic values, become a better person who is better able to help others.

And to you my advice is once again similar. If you’ve sacrificed everything to help others, don’t let it all end with donating a tenner to the OXFAM guy on the street now and then. Join Giving What We Can or go volunteer somewhere. If you’ve sacrificed everything for others, make sure others get something good out of the deal!

Others of you will say yes, my education was worth it. Not because of what I learned about eukaryotes or Ukraine or whatever, but because formal education in the school system taught me how to think.

And to…sorry, one second, HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAAHAHAHAHHHAAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHHA HAHAHAHAHAHAH HAHAHAHHHHHAAAHAHAHAHAH HAHAHHA HAHAHHHHAHAH HAAHHHAHA HAAHAHAHAHHA HAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA AHHHHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHA HHAAAHAHHAAHHAHA AHHAHAHAHAHA hahaha haha ha hahaha haha heh heh heh okay.

I’m sorry. Ahem. To you my advice is, again, similar. If you’ve sacrificed everything to learn how to think, learn how to think. When someone says something you disagree with, before you dismiss a straw man it and call that person names and slap yourself five for your brilliant rebuttal, take a second to consider it fairly on its own terms. Go learn about biases and heuristics and how to avoid them. Read enough psychology and cognitive science to figure out why your claim might kind of inspire hysterical laughter from people even a little familiar with the field. Just don’t sacrifice everything to learn how to think and end up only rearranging your prejudices.

And finally, some of you will say, wait a second, maybe my education wasn’t worth it. Or, maybe it was the best choice to make from within a bad paradigm, but I’m not content with that. And I wish someone had told me about all of this more than fifteen minutes before I graduate.

And to you I can offer a small amount of compensation. You have learned a very valuable lesson that you might not have been able to learn any other way.

You have learned that the system is Not Your Friend.

I use those last three words very consciously. People usually say “not your friend” as an understatement, a way of saying something is actively hostile. I don’t mean that.

The system is not your friend. The system is not your enemy. The system is a retarded giant throwing wads of $100 bills and books of rules in random directions while shouting “LOOK AT ME! I’M HELPING! I’M HELPING!” Sometimes by luck you catch a wad of cash, and you think the system loves you. Other times by misfortune you get hit in the gut with a rulebook, and you think the system hates you. But either one is giving the system too much credit.

Every one of the architects and leaders of the system is fantastically intelligent – some even have degrees from the University of [mumble]. But every one of the neurons in my dog’s brain is a fantastically complex pinnacle of three billion years of evolution, yet my dog herself can spend the better part of an hour standing motionless, hackles raised, barking at a plastic bag.

To you I don’t have very much advice. I’m no smarter than anyone else – well, I know who Euclid is, but other than that – and if I knew how to fix the system, it’s a pretty good bet other people would know too and the system would already have been fixed. Maybe you, armed with a degree from the University of [mumble], will be the one to help figure it out.

On the other hand, someone a lot smarter than I am did have some advice for you. Poor Kurt Vonnegut never did get to give a real graduation speech, but one of his books has some advice targeted at another major life transition:

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-”God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

I don’t know how to fix the system, but I am pretty sure that one of the ingredients is kindness.

I think of kindness not only as the moral virtue of volunteering at a soup kitchen or even of living your life to help as many other people as possible, but also as an epistemic virtue. Epistemic kindness is kind of like humility. Kindness to ideas you disagree with. Kindness to positions you want to dismiss as crazy and dismiss with insults and mockery. Kindness that breaks you out of your own arrogance, makes you realize the truth is more important than your own glorification, especially when there’s a lot at stake.

Here we are at the end of a grinder of $150,000, 20,000 hours, however many dozen collages about The Scarlet Letter, and the occasional locker room cry of “faggot” followed by a punch in the gut. Somewhere in another world, there are people just like us in nice cabins reading Aristotle and knowing that nobody will have to go hungry ever again. The difference between us and them isn’t money, because I think the $155,000 the government gave you could have gone either way – and even if I’m wrong about that there’s more than enough money somewhere else. The difference isn’t intelligence, because the architects of our system are fantastically bright in their own way. I think kindness might be that difference.

Technically kindness plus coordination power, but that’s another speech, and the Dean of Students is starting to make frantic hand signals.

I don’t know if it’s really possible to afford to give everyone that cabin in Colorado. But I hope that the people whose job it is to figure that out approach the problem with a spirit of kindness and humility.

In conclusion, both sides of the sunscreen debate have some pretty good points. It will certainly decrease your risk of squamous and basal cell carcinomas, it probably has no effect on the malignant melanoma rate but there’s a nonzero chance it might either cause or prevent them, and its effect on internal tumors seems worrying at this point but is yet to be backed up by any really firm evidence.

I understand this is complicated and unsatisfying. Welcome to the real world.

[Congratulations to my girlfriend Ozy, who graduates college this week!]

#794, 11th July 1998

Pop Between Realities, Home In Time For TOTP

I’ve talked about Dr Phil Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum blog before on Tumblr, but I’ve held off mentioning it here until this post, for hopefully obvious reasons. TARDIS Eruditorum is a critical Doctor Who blog which has been running since 2011 and will end this year. Its format – which Sandifer calls psychochronography – should be familiar to Popular readers: take a cultural object with a long history, and write about it in chronological order. Naturally, writing about the thing ends up meaning writing around the thing. My brother gave me the first three volumes of the book edition of Eruditorum for Christmas, and it was the kick in the arse I needed to really get moving on Popular again.

Eruditorum is tremendous, a mighty achievement. The workrate is boggling, the insight – about a fearsomely well-covered topic – is top-notch, the comments are friendly, the perspective is original. But my favourite thing about it is the structure – the way posts build over weeks, set up recurring concepts, pay off far later, and delight in the formal experiment and play that Sandifer occasionally unleashes within entries. If you don’t like Doctor Who, you might prefer his other epic project – begun last year – a history of British comics from the 1980s on called The Last War In Albion. (Go and look at its Kickstarter, which I’ve backed and might take your fancy too.)

Obviously, narrativisation is something Doctor Who lends itself to more than, say, the charts do, but even so Eruditorum’s narrative is beautifully done, and it’s been a big (and bleedin’ obvious) influence on me this year, not least in demonstrating that a three-posts-a-week workrate gives you a lot more leeway to spread out thematically. Narrativisation is something I’ve resisted doing in Popular, first because it started as an exercise in ignorance (what can I get out of music I know nothing about, without finding anything out?), then because it’s been flitting around and between a well-established story, and demonstrating the arbitrariness of pop success rather than pop’s progress or cohesion seemed far more to the point.

But I’m now getting to the point where existing histories of pop start to drop away. People have talked about what’s happened (or hasn’t happened) in music over the last fifteen years or so, but the stories haven’t quite settled – or at least, the ones that have are often told by more distanced and unsympathetic observers. It certainly isn’t clear that the UK’s number ones are the sensible or right way to tell such stories – Popular will always have more noise than signal – but I’ve found a few good threads to pull on here.

Billie Piper turns out to be a good place to start unravelling one. She is, of course, now more famous for playing Rose Tyler, one of the leads in the revived Doctor Who series. One of the most joyful moments of my dancing, listening, and fannish life was running Club Popular just before the new series began, and Steve Mannion mixing “Doctorin’ The TARDIS” into “Because We Want To”. I’d like to say I always believed Billie would be good, but I honestly had no idea. Whatever she was going to be like, for those five minutes I was totally up for it.

So Billie’s trajectory went from post-Spice pop star to gossip column regular to co-star in the BBC’s most famous show. But it didn’t start there. Before she got a record deal she’d starred in a handful of Smash Hits ads in 1997. Jumping around, scrambling up to the camera, arms swinging, gum blowing, declaring “100% pure pop”. A deal swiftly followed.

Smash Hits in 1997 was not as confident a magazine as its ads suggested. For all that its heyday in the early 80s had seen it bash margins and mainstream together with irrepressible glee and real impact, it had endured a tougher 1990s – successes with Take That and Peter Andre, but harder going in the heyday of Britpop. Now it saw another opportunity: with pop arcing younger, there was territory to claim. Hence the Billie ads – this loping, laughing 15 year old was Smash Hits’ pick as the face of pop.

But what is pop in 1998? What could Billie be the face of? There’s a negative case, put eloquently by commenter Iconoclast in the B*Witched thread:

“this once vital popular art has become commodified, sanitised, neutered, tamed, and bastardised to the level of unthreatening aural wallpaper you can pick up in the supermarket as background music for a dinner party with your parents; in retrospect, this is (probably unwittingly) laying the ground for the eventual Cowellisation (in a broad sense) of popular music, to be lapped up by a compliant and carefully-groomed public who would be baffled by the idea that things could ever have been different.”

Iconoclast represents one broad orthodoxy on pop music in the post-Britpop years. As you might guess, I think this is a bit simplistic – to take one example, while I’m not going to pretend Simon Cowell is remotely a force for good, his influence on pop has been far more contested and complex than “Cowellisation” implies. The rest of pop conspicuously fails to adopt Cowell’s dreary formulae, and his forte lies in building hostile fiefdoms which have a horrifyingly good success rate at launching raids on the charts but leave very little changed in their wake.

That’s getting ahead of myself, though. And just because I reject this radically negative version of pop as a whole doesn’t mean I don’t see where it’s coming from. Things were fundamentally changing, and changing in ways many people would see as a loss. Billie, in fact, is a fine example of this, precisely by virtue of being on Doctor Who. She successfully crossed the tracks between pop star and actor – a notoriously difficult journey that tended to leave pop musicians looking horribly embarrassed. But Billie was a triumph.

So how does she cross these tracks? What Billie Piper had that a lot of previous stars lacked was theatre school training, at the Sylvia Young school (a miserable experience, by her own later account). This is one of the big late-90s pivots in British pop – the point at which stage school really started to become the training ground for a pop career. And to accentuate the shift – though one trend does not cause the other – it happens when the art school tradition that had fed into UK pop since Lennon and Stu Sutcliffe has begun to sputter out, a victim of funding cuts and the end of student grants.

The rise of stage schools following the decline of art schools has an ongoing effect on who gets to be pop stars in Britain, a shift in emphasis that also shapes the critical reception of UK pop music. Critics train themselves to spot and respond to the kind of qualities the art-pop tradition fosters: self-expression, conceptual fluency, executing your ideas well. The story of British pop in the 60s is – partly, at least – the story of people discovering how fantastic an arena pop was for those qualities.

A performing arts education – I apologise for the vast and possibly ignorant generalisations I’m committing here – is set up for slightly different things. Performance, obviously. The discipline and craft to repeat those performances. And the ability to inhabit, interpret and communicate material, deeply and quickly. Pop music should benefit hugely from that stuff too – though almost nobody, whatever their education, gets to be famous in pop while being awful at communicating and performing.

It’s not that one educational tradition is good for pop and that one is bad. It’s not that a stage school background means you won’t be great at the kind of things art school brought to pop. And there’s always a cartload of other things happening outside either. But the rise of performing arts influence was bound to have an impact.

It’s relevant that Sylvia Young pupil Billie Piper got to notch up number ones and then dance over to acting. It used to be that acting was a famously terrible pop move. Now music and acting are both options in a more general entertainment career – the old light entertainment model that worked for Cliff Richard and Adam Faith, back again. But it’s also relevant that Billie, the 15 year old face of pop on TV in 1997, gets to cross from audience to performer so quickly. It suggests an ideal of pop stardom that plays, at least, at being democratic. Pop in the art school tradition was something alien, something that might drop into your world and help you fall out of it. Billie’s version of pop is something you step up and become part of.

Why? How? Because you want to. “Because We Want To” is an awkward if likeable thing, a mash-up of two kinds of teenage autonomy songs. One – mainly in the chorus – is a battle cry of domestic rebellion in all its snotty, petty and essential glory. That’s all about doing what you want, and if it’s pointless and banal to the grown-ups – “why do you hang around in crowds?” – so much the better. The verses song – perfect for a vision of pop meritocracy – is about being who you want, following your dreams. “Some revolution is gonna happen today,” Billie sings, but it’s a positivity revolt, where the battles happen around mood and attitude, “We’re gonna chase the dark clouds away”.

The do-what-you-want song is honestly the stronger one here, probably because it’s a lot older: its roots go back to the Fifties and generation-gap tracks like “Yakety Yak”. It’s hard to go too wrong with snotty teen rebels, however corny and carefully constructed they are. The be-who-you-want song, though, feels more modern – an approach one that’ll really come into its own in the 00s and 10s with Christina Aguilera and Katy Perry. In this form it’s too frothy, though. It can’t build the demolishing momentum it needs, it has to stand back for the other Billie, kicking over bins, stomping her feet and wanting to dance all night. That version is simply more fun.

The devil, unfortunately, is in the execution, particularly the music, which is often the great weakness of theatre school British pop. You can have a charismatic performer, but too frequently there’s an apparent assumption they can settle for second-rate backing. Here it’s the kind of light R&B we saw on the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” – already a little dated in 1996, but sold on unexpected touches (the P-Funk, the harmonica) which “Because We Want To” doesn’t deliver. And it’s the part where Billie quotes the Spices where the song falls over hardest, nudging her towards rapping, where she loses any hope of sounding like a force of teenage nature and ends up at a kids’ TV approximation of streetwise. “If you want to catch a ride then GET WITH US!”. As Billie’s predecessor on Doctor Who would have said: wicked, Professor.

After a prolonged hiatus, I have decided to resurrect this blog.

The same battles are still being fought. We still do not know how the challenge of Russian neo-fascism will be met. We still do not know how the European Union can maintain liberty and democracy in the face of the economic complexities that it has created. We still do not know if the UK can meet the challenge of Scottish separatism. We still do not know how Liberty can be protected in the face of the multiple challenges of technology, fear and greed.

In Britain, tonight is the eve of the European and some local elections, in some of the rest of the EU, the vote is already taking place, although for most the official polling day is on 25th May. Normally I would be out canvassing or delivering for the Liberal Democrats, but a thousand miles away, in Estonia, the challenge of UKIP seems more absurd than threatening. Doubtless the UK media who have been unearthing the ancient scandals of lazy, stupid or incompetent (not to mention racist and not a little dotty) UKIP MEPs during the campaign- well done the Tory attack dogs there- will revert to "government in crisis as UKIP surge" once the results are in. I for my part have already voted- on line of course- in the Estonian EU elections. I wish I could vote for one of the excellent British Liberal Democrat MEPs that are in danger of being ousted by drastically inferior competitors. However, as a permanent resident of Estonia, I have chosen to make a difference here.

In a way the Euro campaign reflects the reality of British politics as a whole. The train wreck of Ed Miliband trying to bluff and bullshit his way out of a trap on BBC Radio Wiltshire was cringe-making and hilarious at the same time. The circus of UKIP has come under sustained attack and Farage too has been revealed as a lying bullshitter. Meanwhile the coalition hunkers down- Cameron hoping to hold his ground and Clegg- who had the nous, but not, alas, the killer instinct, to challenge Farage first- will be hoping to avoid another evening of outright catastrophe. The Liberal Democrats have become the blame hound of British politics, but as I watch honourable and decent candidates stand up for the Liberal vision I feel a certain frustration that the shallow ignorance of the British political discourse is trashing Lib Dem support for mistakes that are more obvious and outrageous in the other parties- not least the nasty and pointless UKIP. The fact is that it is Labour for their incompetence and UKIP for their triviality and greed that should be being punished at these elections.

So, I wish my Liberal Democrat  friends and colleagues the best of luck. I think we can limit the damage somewhat this time, and if we do, then I hope that the next few months will see a fairer assessment of the considerable achievements of Liberal Democrats in government.

And anyway, after all, it is never over until the return officer clears his throat!    

Remember Newsweek? It used to be a news magazine, but they magazined so poorly that they were just a website until recently. They’re back in print, and here’s the latest cover:

(I’d like to point out that the JPG artifacts surrounding the magazine’s name are not from me shrinking the image down. Those are in the image on the magazine’s website, so they’re apparently still committed to quality.)

The cover story is on America’s obsession with conspiracy theories, an obsession I share, except America is obsessed with believing in them. It’s a worthwhile thing to talk about, since it seems like every since issue that comes up for debate is tainted by some kook declaring it the work of the Antichrist, Jews, George Soros, and so forth. The same people who snorted derisively at Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” now can’t shut up about the plots and wheels behind Benghazi. Every incident is either something cooked up by one group or a “false flag” cooked up by the other. It’s a poisonous environment where no sensible discussion can emerge.

The media doesn’t help, either, since it loves giving these people a voice. If some nutjob thinks that the American Medical Association joined with ACORN to do the Newtown shootings, we have to bring them on the show and let them holler, or at least admit that they raise a lot of questions.

The Newsweek article talks about all of this, mentioning death panels, Agenda 21, Common Core, and other current darlings of conspiracy lore. But then they say this:

Take the theories about the George W. Bush administration. There have been claims and suggestions that Bush used the 9/11 attacks — or even engineered them — as a pretext to engage in wars and increase the state security infrastructure; that his vice president, Dick Cheney, orchestrated the Iraq War to shovel millions of dollars in reconstruction contracts to his former employer, Halliburton; and that the administration rigged the 2004 election through fraud in Ohio. And while these ideas have been put forward by plenty of regular citizens, they have also been advanced by national political figures: respectively, Keith Ellison, a Democratic congressman; Senator Rand Paul, a Republican associated with the party’s libertarian wing; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of Bobby Kennedy, who is now a liberal radio talk-show host.

Maybe I’m too far gone down the rabbit hole myself, but there’s a huge difference between “Bush did 9/11″ and “Bush and Cheney used 9/11 as a way to get a war they had already wanted in Iraq to happen.” The former is unsupported nonsense. The latter is documented fact. It doesn’t take an unhinged mind and a lot of logical gymnastics to deduce that Bush and Cheney took advantage of the attack to steer sentiment towards the Iraq war. That’s not the stuff of grainy photos, rumors, and smudged Xeroxes, it’s easily verifiable, countable data that we actually were interested in for a brief moment a few years back.

This isn’t just obnoxious and self-serving, it’s dangerous. To deny what actually happened in the lead-up to the Iraq War is to basically say that the story of the time, that we had credible evidence of imminent WMD use, is legitimate. It’s not, and it never was. It wasn’t a case of the CIA cooking the evidence up, it was a case of the CIA being told to cook the evidence up by the White House. Again, this isn’t wild speculation, we have facts on this. It supports the narrative that anyone who supported the call for war (including Ms. Clinton herself) was understandably convinced of a clear and present danger, which was simply not true. Furthermore, dismissing the fact that Bush and Cheney lied and lied some more to get their war done as a mere fairy story for cranks not only lets them off the hook, but it permits further presidents to do the same.

But of course, looking at the evidence of manipulation would reveal just how much of the media, Newsweek included, whenever they weren’t reporting about the reality of Heaven, aided and abetted the White House by breathlessly repeating whatever hysterical absurdities they were told without doing any work — such as, say, journalism — to verify if any of it matched reality. Better still to say, “No, there was no outright falsification and manipulation of information that we both fell for and encouraged.” If there were no perpetrators, then there can’t be any victims or accomplices.

It’s also interesting to see Newsweek reporting on studies of how people who believed Sarah Palin’s “death panels” story reacted when given evidence that such things didn’t exist. Newsweek, and few other media sources, can’t give examples of when they themselves revealed that the “death panels” nonsense was a lie because they have absolved themselves of this duty, instead explaining that if Palin said it, they just have to report it and their work is done. You cannot fault Americans for hanging on to faulty information if you are responsible for disseminating it without question.

You’ll note that when asking where conspiracy theories come from, Newsweek cites the usual: fringe sources, social media, “the Internet”. Certainly not reputable places like Newsweek, who would never, ever do such a thing. They mention “the mass media” and “news outlets” but only in a matter-of-fact way. They also end the article with

So it goes with the endless loop of conspiracy theories. They can’t be corrected, they can’t be killed. Anyone who attempts to disprove some feverish thought must be involved in the plot. Indeed, most of the experts interviewed for this article agreed on one fact: Once it was published, Newsweek would be accused of being part of the conspiracy.

That’s me rolling my eyes at you, Newsweek.

It seems there is one lesson I’ll never learn: if it can be helped, don’t plan to do anything after doing something I know will be massively overloading. I mean, I know not to plan to do anything stressful. I’m vaguely grasping the concept of not planning to do anything involving other people. But when it gets really bad, even that blog post I was planning to write and that bit of work I was planning to finish are not going to happen. They won’t happen. Nothing you can do. They just won’t. Do. Not. Plan. Anything.

Generally I get two types of sensory overload (your mileage may vary):

Same reaction, different threshold. For example, jumping at a loud noise that didn’t startle anyone else. Or arriving at the lecture hall and immediately flushing up. The former is over in a split second, the latter is a bit more horrid but still fades away after a few minutes, and both are very quickly forgotten about as I generally get on with life. For me, the main problem here is self-consciousness rather than anything else.

A Huge Draining Longer-Term One. For example, arguments, unpredictable crowds, parties… oh, and that weather I’m trying in vain not to talk about. At least all the other stuff exists in finite spaces for a finite period of time, and can be escaped from. Anyway, this is where my reaction to The Overloading Thing becomes, at least internally, really different from the standard neurotypical not-liking-this-much reaction. There is, somewhere, a threshold at which a meltdown will happen, but luckily I don’t tend to reach it all that often. Throughout The Overloading Thing, I might be coping pretty well; in fact, it’s pretty likely that I’ll still mainly be enjoying the event as a whole, seeing The Overloading Thing as simply a drawback that’s worth it overall. Sometimes I even get used to it and think I’m absolutely fine.

And then I get home. And. I’m. So. So. So. Drained.

As those of you who follow my Twitter and have had to put up with my whining for the past couple of days may know, I don’t handle heat well. I mean, my body is okay; to be fair, this is probably because it’s stuck with a terrified obsessive controlling brain that only lets it out of the shade when it absolutely has no other choice, but I’ve never actually had sunstroke or similar, I vaguely remember dehydration happening on holiday once when I was like 4, and sunburn is very rare too. My brain, on the other hand, just goes all over the place. It’s an sensory overload thing, and then a panicking-about-sensory-overload thing; consequently, it both worsens and is worsened by my other hypersensitivities. I was out all afternoon yesterday at a garden party, and I had a great day, but realistically it was too much people-ing and too much sun (seriously, if you’re doing outdoors-y stuff, make sure there’s a bit of shade, it’s a tiny silly little thing that not many people understand and it’s massively frustrating) to handle in one sitting.

Still, though, I figured after getting in, having a cold shower, putting some cream on the burned shoulder and continuing to underestimate just how much water I am in fact capable of drinking, I’d feel several billion times better and could, well, get on with the aforementioned stuff I’d planned to do. I have a tendency to think “hey, looks like I survived that without a meltdown or a shutdown, hooray for me” and assume I’ll be fine afterwards. I always forget just how much a massive sensory overload, whatever the cause, wipes me out totally. “Tired” doesn’t quite cover it.

Instead, I end up doing, well, not much. Check Facebook. Check Twitter. Check WordPress. Go back to Facebook. There’s nothing new. Scroll down anyway. Put more cream on the relevant shoulder. Stare blankly at Facebook. Think “Okay, so I overdid it”. Think very little else. It’s a state of “nope, that’s it, limit reached, no more input please”. I’ve found that sometimes, for some reason, a little positive input seems to help; despite the many quiet gentle relaxing songs in existence (and, well, the “silence” alternative), last night nothing did the trick quite like this, or this, or this (which is where I got this post’s title from). I have no idea why that is, especially when there are quiet gentle relaxing Muse songs in existence too, but there you go. I even paced around the room a little, which is my standard “MUSIC IS HAPPENING YAY” stim, but perhaps less ideal when you feel like you’ve used up every last drop of energy. Senses are odd. Other than general sensory oddities, though, I tend to just… sort of… want… nothing… to… happen.

Of course, eventually it starts to get better. The only completely reliable “cure” I’ve found is a good night’s sleep; having said that, the vast majority of my Overloading Things are in some way related to big social events, which tend to either take place in the evening or at least go on until then, so that’s probably why. I suppose, eventually, a lot of time to hide away and recover and regulate would have the same effect. In a way, though, it isn’t totally over; most of the time, it gets filed away under “Things That Made You Feel Awful Which You Should Try And Avoid Where Possible In Future”. If something has gone consistently wrong in the past, I guess it’s natural to perceive it as a threat, to worry about it, to plan ahead and specifically go out of your way to avoid it. Even where that’s not always 100% possible. Or  50% possible. Or possible at all. Or possible at all with no firm knowledge of when it will become possible.

No wonder the slightest bit of sun freaks me out so much.

Tagged: actuallyautistic, Autism, sensory overload, sensory processing, the heat thing again

The micro-entrepreneurship site Etsy now has a more than a million sellers, individuals — overwhelmingly women — making things like barnwood cutting boards, hand-sewn tea towels and children's toys out of their homes or small manufacturing plants.

You would not get any indication that many of them exist, however, if you looked at government data on traditional jobs and small businesses. Their businesses are so small as to get swept aside by the definitions of the Small Business Administration, which include more than 500 employees and millions of dollars in annual receipts.

"That would put Etsy the company in the same category as our sellers," says Althea Erickson, Etsy's public policy director (yes, Etsy has as public policy director). "That’s crazy."

And the work these people do is either sporadic or so inseparable from personal life that it often doesn't look like a "job." Or a "second job" for that matter.

"They get shoved into the 'bad jobs' or 'bad businesses' frame," Erickson says, "as opposed to being taken on their own terms."

We tend to think these jobs are "bad" -- or not even jobs at all -- because they don't come with benefits, because they seem part-time in nature, because they appear to have popped up in response to a bad economy. And as businesses, we think they're "bad," too, because no one expects the woman who makes custom fire station playhouses to grow into the next Mattel. In fact, according to Erickson, most Etsy sellers don't particularly aspire to become big businesses, or to obtain the credit and investors that might get them there.

These people are, however, doing some kind of work — they're making money and producing something, after all — as are many others in the messy peer-to-peer part of the economy where personal and professional activities now increasingly overlap. But the government hasn't counted what it calls "contingent workers" since 2005. You can tell the government that you're self-employed, or that you have a "second job," or a "part-time job." But it's harder to communicate that while you have a regular job at a coffee shop, and maybe even a temp job on the side, you also make money roughly eight hours a week stitching pillows for sale in your living room while you watch TV.

"If I were to ask the government for one thing, it would be to count this sector better," Erickson says. "I feel like things aren’t real until they’re counted, often."

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey asks questions like "Altogether, how many jobs do you have?" and "How many hours per week do you usually work at your other job?" But these questions assume that someone who gives a ride on UberX, or runs chores through TaskRabbit, or sells crafts on Etsy considers the activity a "job." They also assume that all work can be counted in hours.

But how would you count the amount of time you spend hosting people on Airbnb, or giving rides in your car when you're already on your way to the grocery store? And it's particularly hard to measure work when the people doing it don't consider themselves making "income" so much as rent or gas money.

Here are some more measurement conundrums: If you're one of these "micro entrepreneurs," how would you decide which parts of your "home office" you can write off on your taxes when the economic activity you do at home involves making bath products in your kitchen? How would you calculate your estimated quarterly self-employment taxes when 90 percent of your earnings come around the holidays?

We are, in sum, looking for answers to several questions: How many people are layering this type of Internet-enabled more nebulous work on top of more traditional labor? If micro-entrepreneurs run the gamut from dabblers to full-time proprietors of a business of one (maybe two), how large is that universe?

Of course, we know that people have been making and selling crafts, and providing small-scale services out of their homes for years. But the marketplace of the Internet -- and the lowered barriers of related services like PayPal and Square -- has turned these activities into something larger, something potentially more viable for many people. Once we know how big of a thing we're talking about, we might begin to ask questions about average earnings and economic impact, about who's doing this as a last resort, and who thinks it's "meaningful work."

"That data is a huge part of what’s missing from the policy conversation," Erickson says, although she defers to others to figure out how the government should pose the questions. "Once you have data to show scale, then people start to say, 'Oh yeah, maybe this is something I should care about, maybe this is something we should start building public policies around.'"

At that point, we can start asking questions about how to enable "micro entrepreneurs," whether they're doing this work because of the crummy economy, or because they'd actually rather make hand soaps at home while hosting tourists than work in a traditional office.

"Ken Clarke is now a Liberal Democrat in all but name," complains Steerpike on his Spectator blog.

This is nonsense.

Clarke is a liberal Conservative - a breed that used to be common, but is not almost extinct. And the Conservative Party is much weaker because of it.

In his early days as leader, it looked as though David Cameron had grasped that, in order to win a majority, his party had to reach out to voters who are not instinctive Conservative voters. And in order to do that, he would have to reverse its rightward drift.

Some even saw the formation of the Coalition as a tactical masterstroke on his part. He had co-opted the Liberal Democrats to take the place of his own party's vanished liberal wing.

Few now see Cameron in those generous terms and Steerpike sounds like a Labour activist from the 1980s saying some moderate MP who refused to back the Militant or Bennite line was a "Tory" who should be thrown out of the party.

The truth is that the Conservative Party, which has not won a majority for 22 years now, needs many more people like Kenneth Clarke if it is to thrive.

By now you’ve heard of the horrific situation in Nigeria, where two hundred girls were kidnapped and probably sold into slavery by a band of Muslim fundamentalists called Boko Haram. The girls’ crime? Trying to get an education, which of course is anathema to any band of religious fundamentalists, since they can’t agree on which is the One True Religion, but they’re all certain that it involves hating women.

The government of Nigeria was content to do nothing until some Nigerian citizens started a Twitter campaign that grew into a worldwide plea: #BringBackOurGirls. This has not only spurred Nigeria into at least acknowledging that a crime took place, but also other countries into offering help. This is literally a moment in which hashtag activism actually helped accomplish something. You’d think that would be a good thing.

You’d also think that this is a political no-brainer. Islamic terrorists kidnapping children? Who in their right mind isn’t going to stand up against that? We as a country have spent the last thirteen years doing whatever we can to fight terrorism. And they’re going after innocent girls! All that’s missing from this scenario is a heads-up display and the ability to switch between weapons quickly and you have all 17 of next year’s best-selling videogames.This is exactly the kind of terror-fighting opportunity you’d think people on both sides of the political aisle would fantasize about.

However.

This image then showed up, Michelle Obama showing solidarity with those seeking justice. And immediately the right wing remembered what they hate more than Islamic terrorists who kidnap innocent women. And they also realized that suddenly they weren’t the center of the discussion, and this also made them furious. So at once they had to lash out, making it clear that while they certainly agreed the Boko Haram actions were horrible, this kind of “lazy activism” instead of “real action” was futile and pointless. Real action such as, I guess, yelling about the Obamas on your radio show.

Ann Coulter even took the opportunity to do her favorite thing: try and get a camera pointed at Ann Coulter.

And, on cue, all the usual morons pumped their fists and started back on Benghazi and Hillary Clinton and all of their usual other nonsense, having been assured that they could — in fact were correct in doing so — ignore this seemingly slam-dunk of a Muslim terrorist situation in favor of their conspiratorial fever-dreams.

Who’s surprised?

I’ve come to realize that there’s a sort of common thread to right wing behavior. You see it when some CEO talks about how sure, he destroyed the pensions of thousands of people to get a few bucks but what he did wasn’t technically illegal. You see it when some blowhard is boasting about how he’s just being honest, just saying what everyone’s thinking, just being a realist and telling it like it is. You see it when someone is talking about how we can’t have a good thing because there are ways it could be exploited for personal gain, and it’s clear they’ve thought about this because it’s exactly what they’d do. You see it when someone complains about the “PC Thought Police” not letting folks bully women, minorities, gay folks, and anyone else they find beneath them. The common thread seems to be:

Someone’s going to be an asshole; why shouldn’t it be me?

Someone’s got to talk shit about all these people trying to do what they can about a horrible situation they’re otherwise powerless over. In fact, the very fact that it’s such a monumentally obvious thing to get behind makes it perfect for someone to come “tell it like it is”. After all, if you’re making a lot of people angry, you must be doing something right! And if someone’s going to do it, why not you? You could be that guy doing something right! You could be the one getting attention for your daring, raw, politically-incorrect truth bombs! There’s no situation where someone can’t be an asshole, and man, are people going to pay attention and talk about that asshole, so why shouldn’t it be you?

It’s not just the attention, though. It’s the wonderful feeling that you’re the smartest guy in the room, the one who sees through the illusion. You’re the lone wolf who hacked the Gibson, who unraveled the conspiracy. All those other fools were taken in, played for fools. They mindlessly followed the rules while you bravely ignored them. You’re better than all of them, smarter, more clever. The rules don’t apply to you. Even if you’re not a Wall Street big shot enjoying he extravagant lifestyle you earned from destroying other people, you can still be a pretty big wheel in right-wing Twitter circles, with thousands of followers ready to agree with you on command.

Someone’s going to be an asshole; why shouldn’t it be me?

Cross-stitch that into a sampler, hang it on your wall, print it onto a small card and keep it in your wallet. It’s your guide to right-wing success.

Interesting article in The Independent today, that has a few choice quotes from generally-not-racist-but-kind-of-xenophobic people that supposedly should be voting Labour, but seem like they'll be supporting UKIP. So why are they?

Let's take a look at some quotes...

“The country is full up with everybody coming in,” says Mr Harmer.

Is it really full up? There are two ways to look at it, the first is in terms of actual area available for people to live in the UK. It's clear that we live in a tiny percentage of the space in this country and that far more space is used for farming, etc (Daily Mail link warning).

Better use of space we already use, along with a change in our views on how much currently non-urbanised space could become space to build and expand into, means we are far from full up.

But this brings us perhaps on to the real reason people feel that the country is "full up", and that is that there appears to not be enough stuff to go around. Housing, schools, A&E waiting time, jobs. You name it we ain't got enough of it. Right now we are facing a schools shortage that will ripple from current primary schools through secondary schools over the next decade thanks to a baby boom driven by higher birth rates at a time of recession, a clear and present sign of just how on the edge our politicians have left the building of infrastructure in this country.

In this case we are only as full up as we're prepared to limit ourselves. Politicians for years seem to have been doing a great job at making sure we're limited, to the point where even without immigration we're running out of services and stretching those that exist to the limit.

His wife, Margaret, will also vote Ukip. She’s upset because she doesn’t get a full pension because she took time off work to look after her children – while immigrants can claim benefits.

“It’s not right,” she adds.

Nor is it actually true. The hypocrisy here is that Margaret seems to believe she is entitled to more than she has put in, but is upset at people that are entitled for things (because they put money in) are potentially taking some of that entitlement on in benefits. (and I say potentially because EU migrants claim less benefits than us Brits do)

Does the blame for successive parties not catering for looking after women that, for either financial necessity or belief that it's the best option for their kids, stay at home in the early years of their children's lives really lay at the feet of migrants rather than the politicians?

Or take Sarah Everitt. Her complaint is the 14 foreign children in her daughter’s class – some of whom have difficulty with English.

“The teachers spend more time with these children than the rest,”

We're freezing council tax, we're tightening the money we spend on teaching staff, and yet we can seemingly also complain about how there aren't enough teachers to go around? If the children weren't "foreign" and had trouble with their english, but were instead just less bright than Sarah's kid and needed the extra support from the teacher...would this be the same conversation?

Of course it wouldn't, there'd be questions about whether or not the school has the teaching assistants it needs to free the teacher up for their proper duties educating the whole class, and whether the funds are there to allow it.

“And they get housing straight away unlike the rest of us.”

Except, again, they don't. The few that may get it ahead of others are deemed by the local authority to be in more need. Why is there a waiting list at all for social housing anyway? Because politicians have failed to ensure that enough houses are being built to house even our population even without migrants coming in!

There is a trend here, isn't there?

Years and years of neglect by the country's leaders when it comes to investing in our country. We sit in the midst of a housing shortage that is pushing rents to unsustainable levels and house prices and their mortgages higher than when the bubble burst. We don't have enough school places for those that UKIP or BNP supporters may call "indigenous" in the coming years because we are not flexible or prepared enough to deal with a baby boom. We don't have the money to pay for future pensions because of a previous baby boom that is skewing the balance of paying in vs paying out.

So why are UKIP getting support? Because the Tories and Labour have made their bed over the decades, they've let migrants become a scapegoat for their own failings in taking care for this country. Migrants are an insignificant cost to the country, if they're even a cost to us at all and yet we reserve so many lines of newspaper columns, news analysis and talk show time for them when the people who have stalled the country are being given a free pass.

And the tragic comedy in all of this is that UKIP have policies that quite frankly are only going to further dent our progress in managing our future. a flat rate of tax that reduces the tax bill for those earning the most money, pulling out of the best trade deals we've got in preference for a non-existent and probably never-will-exist trade union of countries that could quite frankly get a better deal if they just dealt with the EU (as they probably already do), and continuing the privatisation of our services.

Our unhealthy obsession, and excuse making, towards migration has to stop. While I'm not claiming you need to embrace migration, we do need to prioritise what is a problem in this country...and whether it's population rise by British birth rates rising (and death rates dropping as we cure and heal more diseases), or by migration, our problem is the state and/or the private sector, if you prefer, not doing what it needs to do to ensure we have everything we need.

(I am scarce around here because I am simultaneously grappling with impending burn-out—I'm 240,000 words into a 300,000 word project, which is to say, neariy 800 pages into a 1000-page story, and it's hard going because my natural length is closer to 30,000 words—and trying not to scream myself hoarse with rage because politics. (Ahem. That is: we swim in a media environment that is designed to act as a potent neurological depressant, the various incumbents are currently covering possibly the most important election campaign I've lived through, and about two-thirds of them have a partisan agenda: the cognitive dissonance is getting to me.) But anyway: happy fun blog thoughts, or at least not overtly political blog thoughts, now follow.)

Where do heroes come from?

I will confess that I find it difficult to write fictional heroes with a straight face. After all, we are all the heroes of our internal narrative (even those of us who others see as villains: nobody wakes up in the morning, twirls their moustache, and thinks, how can I most effectively act to further the cause of EVIL™ today?). And people who might consider themselves virtuous or heroic within their own framework, may be villains when seen from the outside: it's a common vice of fascists (who seem addicted to heroic imagery—it's a very romantic form of political poison, after all, the appeal to the clean and manly virtue of cold steel in subordination to the will of the State), and also of paternalist authoritarians.

But where does it come from?

I've been reading a lot of superhero fiction lately (The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar, Turbulence by Samit Basu, the Velveteen books by Seanan McGuire, to name but four: I'll even confess to Carrie Vaughn's superhero spin-off series, and others besides) and pathologically failing to get around to reading Supergods by Grant Morrison—I am remiss, and my ability to absorb dollops of theory after a hard day of scribbling is very small ... but it seems pretty damn clear that the superhero archetypes hail back to the polytheistic religions of yore, to the Greek, Roman, Norse, and Egyptian pantheons and their litany of family feuds and bad-tempered bickering. (And is it just me or are half the biggest plots in superhero pre-monotheist mythology the punch-line to the God-Father (or occasionally one of his more troublesome sons) failing to keep his cock to himself, and the other half due to a jealous squabble between goddesses that escalates into a nuclear grudge-fest until suddenly Trojan Wars break out?)

We have this in common with our 5000-years-dead ancestors: we're human beings, and our neural architecture hasn't changed that much since the development of language and culture (unless you believe Julian Jaynes—and I don't). We still have the same repertoire of emotional reactions. We still have a dismaying tendency to think it's all about us, for any value of "it" you care to choose. We fall for a whole slew of common cognitive biases, including a complex of interacting heuristics that make us highly vulnerable to supernatural beliefs and religions. (The intentional stance per Dennett means we ascribe actions to intentionality; confirmation bias leads us to assume intentionality to natural events because this is something that's been bred into us throughout the many millions of years of predator/prey arms races that weeded out those of our ancestors who weren't fast enough to correlate signs such as lion prints at the nearby watering hole with other signs like Cousin Ugg going missing and realize there was a connection. So our ancestors looked on as lightning zapped another unfortunate Cousin Ugg, felt instinctively that there had to be a reason, and decided there was a Lightning God somewhere and he'd gotten mad at our tribe.)

We have other biases. We look at people with good skin and bilaterally symmetrical features (traits indicative of good health) and we see them as beautiful (hey, again: we're the end product of endless generations of organisms that did best when they forged reproductive partnerships with other organisms that were in good health), so obviously they've been blessed by the gods. And the gods bless those who are virtuous, because virtue (by definition) is what the gods bless you for. So beauty comes to be equated with good; and this plays itself out in our fictions, where our heroes and favoured protagonists are mostly handsome or pretty and the villains are ugly as sin ...

This isn't just a fictional trope. Look at the studies of physical appearance and pay levels in business: the taller you are, the higher your earning potential, and the fatter you are (fat is currently associated with sloth and greed—both vices) the less you earn. (Again, look at US presidents: they're all freakishly tall, and it's very common for shorter candidates to be weeded out earlier in their party primary selection process. The POTUS is a hero role—the father of the nation and all-protector with the power to throw nuclear fireballs or send Reaper drones to slay the tribal enemies. No surprise that candidates for POTUS have to look heroic, inasmuch as this is possible when there's a threshold age for entry of around 40 years and the uniform is a lounge suit.)

But back to fiction: we also have the reification of good and evil. People who believe in such a dualistic eschatology often find it quite hard to explain just what constitutes good or evil; as the judge said in the pornography trial, "I know it when I see it". I say that it's entirely an artefact of where you stand; good is what I think is good, evil is what people who disagree with me think is good. The inability to separate subjective detriment from objective detriment is at the root of a lot of our social failure modes: from morality legislation along the lines of "this is no good for me, therefore we must forbid everybody from doing it", to the blood feud. It's a very handy tool for constructing the plots that underlie narratives of human tragedy, as long as you don't take it at face value (in which case you get paper-thin ugly caricatures of villainy battling it out with two-fisted pretty-faced righteousness, and you just know in advance how that is going to end).

Okay, simple thesis: superhero fiction and imagery is very largely a throwback to an earlier age, to the clan-based hero/villain narratives of polytheism, the great tragedies of lust, betrayal and revenge. By giving the protagonists of fiction supernatural powers we can amplify the drama of their confrontations: turn up the gain on the emotional nuances, present with dramatic immediacy and impact questions about philosophy—the will to power, the limits of moral behaviour—that are for most of us, most of the time, remote abstractions. All of this is a major tool in the arsenal of the fantastika, allowing us to examine these themes of empowerment and morality in a contemporary or alternate setting without the handicaps of excessive realism (as with hard SF) or the other problematic issues of genre fantasy (do you pick high fantasy, with the distancing and frequently questionable cod-mediaevalism of its settings, or urban fantasy, with its raft of cliched vampire and werewolf lore?) ... to some extent the cold war spy thriller also enabled these fantasies of super-agency, by placing mundane trenchcoat-wearing office workers at the fulcrum of terrible forces, but it was a clumsy and indirect approach, more reminiscent of the form of Lovecraftian horror (as I've written elsewhere). Giving the agents and antagonists personal superpowers (as Lavie Tidhar does in "The Violent Century") works so much better at highlighting the human consequences of tragedy.

Superhero fiction emerged in its modern form in the 1920s and 1930s, at much the same time as science fiction. (I think it's no coincidence that these forms emerged just as mainstream literature decisively turned its back on the fantastic, while ongoing accelerating technological change and the social tensions of the Great Depression and the rise of duelling totalitarian ideologies took hold on the popular imagination.) At times it was used for much more experimental work, but from the early 1950s onwards the dead hand of the Comics Code Authority crippled its efficacy as an expressive fiction format in American literature, with particularly detrimental effects on the depiction of female and ethnic minority empowerment (no, seriously, click that link: Saladin Ahmed has done your homework for you and there is stuff there that you probably won't believe). But from the late 1970s onwards the effects of the CCA—and, in the UK, the Obscene Publications Act (1958) (which gave the police extraordinary powers to seize and destroy anything they deemed "obscene", with the onus on the accused to prove that it wasn't with their liberty in jeopardy if they took the case to court) began to fade. And since then we've seen, first, the flowering of graphic novels (permitting long form story arcs to progress and develop, with character studies far more detailed than the previous norm in weekly or monthly 16- or 24-page comics), and subsequently the adoption of some superhero tropes in SF/F written fiction, and the huge boom in the Marvel and DC movie franchises.

The big movie breakthrough was probably the 1978 Christopher Reeve Superman movie, a big budget film that was groundbreaking in the way it handled both storytelling and production values for what had hitherto been perceived by the film industry as "kids stuff". And I don't think it's a coincidence that 20-30 years later we're seeing a boom in literary fiction that uses with the tropes of superhero/supervillain comics.

Novelists don't really hit their stride until they reach their late 30s to 40s; the generation who grew up with post-Superman movies and the likes of "V for Vendetta" and Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" were ready to take the rich source material of modern mythology seriously in a way that most of their elders (honorable exceptions like Kim Newman notwithstanding) were not. We're probably still 20-30 years away from a superhero novel winning the Booker prize, much less the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I wouldn't write the idea off as fantasy; the re-legitimization of the art form into the mainstream of literature is visibly on-going, and its assimilation is probably proceeding faster than that of SF—a spiky, chewy, unlovable form that is hard for the humanities to approach. (The tools of hard science fiction are much trickier and slipperier to handle than those of the fantastic, because the cultural divide in our educational systems deprive many of the people following the literary and cultural track of the tools they need to engage with science and technology effectively. Whereas myth and legend comes naturally to the hands of people whose education, even if it doesn't directly engage with the Greek and Latin classics, is pervaded by the writings of the literary elders who did.)

As for me, I'm writing this blog entry to keep track of my thoughts on the subject for another matter: the afterword to Laundry Files #6, "The Armageddon Score". Which is complete in first draft, and will be published in July 2015, and deals with the matter of superheroes. Because in today's fast-moving hyper-colourful world, a literary character study of a middle-aged civil servant's mid-life turmoil, marital breakdown, and career crisis really needs Dolby surround sound, spectacular special effects, and lots of skin-tight lycra. At least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. (It started with two elevator pitches: A character study of a middle-aged female civil servant's marital and career breakdown (with super-heroes), and—the action-oriented version—Bob's exes form a superhero team: together, they fight crime. Make what you will of this, I'm saying no more until this time next year.)

Jonathan Haidt has a saying: “People are ninety percent chimp and ten percent bee”. It’s supposed to mean that people usually push each other around selfishly to gain status, but occasionally have an ability to come together into a single unified superorganism working for the common good. He seems to reify this more than a little, treating it as a “switch” that can be turned on by certain situations or rituals. He gives lots of examples, but four that stick out for me are patriotism, prayer, team sports, and pep rallies.

They stick out because they’re a pretty good list of the things that most turned me off when I was younger.

I was definitely one of those people who fact-checked patriotism: “America is number one? Really? Then how come Canada has lower crime, lower poverty rate, lower infant mortality, and higher self-rated life satisfaction?” The feeling engendered by an image of an eagle flying in front of the American flag while the Star-Spangled Banner played in the background was a combination of cringing and urge to nitpick.

As for prayer, I distinctly remember putting my very progressive rabbi on the spot about whether God literally existed, and when the rabbi answered something like “Well, it depends how literally you want to take the word literal…” I asked him why we spent so much time praying. He replied that he liked to do things for no reason because he was stupid. Or, well, probably that wasn’t actually what he said, but that is pretty much how my brain remembers whatever weasel answer he gave. I stopped going to synagogue very shortly after that.

Team sports always seemed moderately barbaric. When forced to participate, I treated them about the same way I treat being on call in hospital as an intern – desperately pray that none of the activity happens in an area I am responsible for, frantically try to transfer it to some more qualified person when it does, and make burnt offerings of thanksgiving to the gods of every major world religion when it’s over.

But pep rallies were the worst of all. It wasn’t just that they were celebrations of the kind of guys who would yell incomprehensible things at me, led by the kind of girls who would preemptively tell me they would never date me even though I hadn’t asked. It was just…the inexplicable, horrible noise. Like I’m sure everyone’s had those times when one of the dogs in your neighborhood starts barking, and then that makes another dog start barking, and soon all of the dogs in your neighborhood are barking really loud for no real reason. And I would always think, “Well, it’s not supposed to make sense to me, I’m not a dog.” But pep rallies were the same thing, and I didn’t have that excuse!

So I came out of all this stuff figuring I lacked what Haidt calls “the hive switch”, the ability for the right trigger to take you outside yourself and bring you into ecstatic union with an in-group. And most of the people I most respected felt the same way. It was even a point of pride: “I’m the sort of person who can see through pep rallies and isn’t stupid enough to start screaming with the rest of them.”

And I noticed this same thing in the epic comment thread to my What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It. Here are some quotes from readers:

“There seems to be a set of social-emotions that I don’t quite get. Like when people say they’re ‘offended’. The idea of getting fist-fightingly violent over mildish insults, or teary because some symbol has been disrespected is just confusing to me.”

“I don’t get political rallies. You know the ones, where some major politician goes in front of a big crowd and pours on the charisma, and everybody is cheering and shouting all at once? I used to live in Iowa, so I’ve had the opportunity to be in a bunch of those crowds, and the whole thing always seemed… just completely baffling.”

“I’ve never been to a rally, but I also don’t get them. In fact, I find myself actively creeped out by many forms of collective displays of emotion/enthusiasm.”

“I have never been able to take any ritual seriously. As a kid in Church I always thought everyone was just playing along, that nobody actually believed the stuff we were talking about, the same way nobody actually believes in Superman. I always expected someone to break character and then everybody to start laughing.”

“I have never really experienced communal grief. The idea that something like an attack or natural disaster that kills or injures strangers (even if they happen to share citizenship of a country, state, or city with you) or the death of a well-known public figure could elicit an emotion resembling what you feel when someone you know dies does not make intuitive sense to me.”

“I don’t understand or don’t enjoy many group activities, including parties, group conversations, watching team sports (such as football), participating in team sports, political rallies, concerts.”

I have heard a very attractive explanation for this. Being a nerd, goes the explanation, is sort of like autism. And autistic people are missing a lot of the brain’s normal social machinery. So nerds are just autistic enough to be missing the hive switch.

It is never a good idea to underestimate human variation. But this has not been my experience.

Since about age fourteen, I’ve been involved in “micronations”, a weird hobby treading an uncomfortable line between roleplaying game and secessionist movement. Groups of friends come together to design countries which engage in various strange and often confrontational forms of politics and foreign policy.

And most of the teenaged friends who I worked with on this had the same attitudes toward patriotism as teenaged me – it was stupid, Canada was better than America, why do people waste money on stupid flag pins, et cetera.

And we became fanatically protective of these tiny little fake nations of ours, and people who would have sold out the US for a nickel would spend sleepless nights zealously defending the reputation of a country whose population was in the single digits and whose constitutions included sections like “Article Five: Design for a judicial system to go here eventually”.

And I have noticed something similar even out here in the world of countries larger than a backyard. Anyone following the beautiful fountain of drama that is Justine Tunney’s Twitter will notice her relationship with Google borders on the same fervency that marked our micronational patriotism. And then there are the great nerd cults, like Objectivism and the one that I’m not supposed to use in the same sentence as “cult” for search-engine-related reasons.

I remember how back during the 2008 presidential election, when Michelle Obama saw that the tide was turning in Barack’s favor she said something like “For the first time, I feel proud to be an American”. She got a lot of flak about that from the press, but I think she was honest and I think was a perfectly understandable feeling (albeit not the best thing to say if you’re the wife of a presidential nominee). It’s the feeling of going from an out-group you can’t identify with to an in-group you can.

I think the thing with nerds and hive switches is the same. It’s not that we lack the ability to lose ourselves in an in-group, it’s that all the groups people expected us to lose ourselves in weren’t ones we could imagine as our in-group by any stretch of the imagination. We didn’t cheer on the jocks and cheerleaders at pep rallies not because the secret switch in our brain was broken, but because the secret switch in our brain didn’t think jocks and cheerleaders were worth cheering for.

You remember that scene in Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn and his soldiers are marching to the gates of Mordor? And…well…you know the quote:

Sons of Gondor! Of Rohan! My brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the age of Men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand! Men of the West!

That was basically a pep rally. And by god, we cheered. Because Aragorn was worth cheering for.

During my life, I have had two groups I really really feel comfortable saying were my in-groups. The Republic of Shireroth. And the rationalist community. When the Shirerithians played their national anthem, I stood. And when the rationalists had a religious ritual, I prayed.

Once I found my hive switch, so to speak, it’s been easier to appreciate patriotism and religion. Team sports still involves a little too much sweat, and pep rallies don’t mesh well with my auditory processing issues, but I can see in principle how someone might enjoy them.

And I guess you would ask why you would want to. But feeling like you’re really connected to other people, not just in a “they share my goals and seem okay” way but in a “these are my people, we form a tribe or a community or, while on horseback, a horde” way is one of life’s greatest pleasures and also a pretty important subgoal to anything that requires cooperation with other people. The only experience I can compare it to was being a kid and thinking I would never be dumb enough to waste time with crushes and romance, and then growing older and having the appropriate genetic payload unpack itself and tell me that this was a big part of what makes life worth living.

So my advice to anyone else who thinks they’re a hundred percent chimp and totally bee-less is to find an in-group that really is their in-group, then try again.

Let's be perfectly honest here. This movie exists for only one reason, and it's obviously well aware of this itself as well.

So, right away we have a situation that's manifestly different than last time. To the point where Star Trek III: The Search for Spock isn't really even a film it's possible to critique: It's quite clearly not trying to be anything other than what it self-evidently is: Episode two of what's become an unfolding serial. I'll return to this theme a bit later, but first of all, there's a curious observation I'd like to make here: If Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was a B-movie that didn't want to admit it was a B-movie, this film, by contrast and inversely, is a B-movie that doesn't actively try to punch above its weight class, but somehow succeeds in doing so anyway. Yes, against all odds, I'd have to say this is the best Star Trek movie we've looked at to date.

Part of this is that, unlike the previous two efforts, this movie actually feels like Star Trek. From Kirk's opening Captain's Log recap of the events of the last film's climax and aftermath, there's a heart to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock utterly absent in either of its predecessors. Kirk isn't just blatantly stating emotions and themes like he's reading from the SparkNotes version of the script, he actually seems like he's experiencing those emotions and attempting to deal with them. Kirk, and everyone else in this movie, feels like an actual character this time instead of a mouthpiece spouting Big Important Themes. It helps that the dialogue is considerably more naturalistic this time around, but I think what really salvages the show here are the actors themselves, who seem visibly energized in a way I don't really think I've ever seen this cast behave before. Sure, they've conveyed loyalty, friendship and camaraderie and all those Important Star Trek Buzzwords in the past, but this is the first time they seem to openly embody and embrace them (or at least the first time since Star Trek: The New Voyages) and this gets written back into their performances: There's a genuine, heartfelt sense that they finally understand why what they're doing is so important.

Which is only fitting considering this movie is ultimately about the fact Star Trek is a beloved thing important to many people. The reaction to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan supposedly was what convinced Leonard Nimoy to come out of retirement again, and request the directorial gig on this film to boot (Nimoy, by the way, is a thoroughly capable director, makes an utterly more visually interesting film than young Nicholas Meyer did and paves the way for future Star Trek actors to make the switch to behind-the-camera work too). This translates to a genuine sense of fun in front of the camera, with each of the principle characters getting plenty of moments to be funny or do something cool (Uhura's scene in the transporter room is an absolute moment of triumph: Seriously, you want to just cheer for Nichelle Nichols). For the first time in twenty years (or at the very least least since “Beyond the Farthest Star”) this cast actually feels like a true ensemble and the Enterprise crew finally feels like the family and community Star Trek always wanted us to think it was: Quite fitting for the themes this movie is working with elsewhere.

It also helps a lot that this movie actually looks like a movie: The special effects are all very good and both they and the general cinematography feel suitably cinematic in scope. The new designs are fantastic: Spacedock is a truly breathtaking thing to behold (though I actually prefer it when Star Trek: The Next Generation lifts the footage of it for use as Starbase 74 in “11001001” four years later) and the Klingon Bird-of-Prey is a really slick-looking ship that's shot to look menacing and cool. There is far, far less obvious CSO hackery than there was in the previous efforts and though it reuses just as many sets as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan did (most of the Spacedock interiors are redresses of Enterprise sets, as are, obviously, the bridges of the Excelsior and the Grissom) it's not so blatantly phoned in this time and that, combined with the new sets that actually were built, allow Star Trek III: The Search for Spock to do a very good job conveying the feeling of a large, expansive Star Trek universe without resorting to demanding a hideously overblown budget.

However, that said, and granting that I really actually did enjoy watching this movie, there's a lot of things about it I found annoying. Saavik is an obvious causality (so is David, literally so, but he's part and parcel of the same problem). Yes, it's a shame Kirstie Alley couldn't come back (there are conflicting stories as to why: Either she was afraid of being typecast or her agent demanded more money than Paramount could afford to pay, without Alley's knowledge) but Robin Curtis makes a perfectly serviceable Vulcan and she goes on to become one of Star Trek's most admirably workmanlike go-to guest actors. Though in a way I'm glad Alley didn't come back, because this movie is the beginning of a systematic process to take Saavik, once clearly marked as the new leading lady of Star Trek, and shunt her to the margins of the Original Series story. She doesn't have much more of a role here than to get stranded on the Genesis planet, kidnapped by Klingons and to take care of Baby Spock.

(And, it should be noted, take part in what has got to be the least erotic sex scene in the entire history of cinema. The ramifications of this will prove absolutely dire, but we'll deal with that when we revisit the Original Series story in a couple years.)

The sad reality is that making an entire movie about “getting the band back together” does nothing but contribute further to the ossification of the Original Series status quo as “the way things are supposed to be”. As good as the original cast is here, the guest cast is positively shafted, with two major exceptions: The first is James B. Sikking as Captain Styles of the Excelsior, who does a delightfully tongue-in-cheek sketch comedy version of a military commander, strutting up and down his bridge with a baton and just generally looking stuffy and pompous. Seriously, were this movie a Monty Python sketch you could totally imagine John Cleese or Graham Chapman playing him. The other is, of course, Christopher Lloyd as Lord Commander Kruge, who is amazing. OK, so for people who haven't seen this movie...Imagine Doc Brown from Back to the Future as a Klingon warlord...And that's exactly how Lloyd plays Kruge here. But what makes his turn really genius is that Lloyd is a good enough actor that he can switch between campy, overblown manic gurning and deathly serious emotional gravity.

Which is precisely what the character of Kruge needs, because there's a secret story to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock that both hints at a much greater film this could have been and is further evidence of the increasingly narrow channels at least this version of Star Trek is being forced into. See, if you strip away all the maniacal, B-movie scheming, explosions and fisticuffs, the fact is that Kruge is actually *right* here: He doesn't want to use the Genesis device to conquer new worlds for the Klingon Empire, he wants to steal it so the Federation doesn't have it anymore, rightly recognising it as the Doomsday device it really is. Think about it: This is a bomb that can level entire planets...and then reshape them any way the Federation wants. It's the ultimate wet dream of the Federation's darkest, most imperialistic unspoken desires. Kruge immediately, and correctly, recognises this as evidence the Federation has become the most dangerous threat in the galaxy and takes it upon himself to put a stop to it for the safety and sovereignty of the other non-aligned cultures. With a few minor dialogue edits, Kruge could have been an utterly sympathetic tragic hero, and, to his credit, Lloyd almost gets there all by himself just working with the material he's given.

And this is exactly what Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was supposed to be about. Kruge was originally going to be a Romulan character on par with the commander from “Balance of Terror” (hence why he has a Bird-of-Prey) and he and Kirk were going to have an actually serious, intelligent and mature debate about the ethics of the Federation developing this kind of weapon. And remember, this is also the story where the crew basically commits high treason, stealing the Enterprise and violating every single regulation to save Spock's life, finally placing friendship and morality above their careers and Federation interest. No wonder this is pegged as “The Final Voyage of the Starship Enterprise”: Not only is the ship itself destroyed (in what is admittedly a rather hollow and transparently obvious attempt to drum up drama in a similar way to Spock's death in the last movie), but this film finally marks the point where Star Trek rejects its own ethics to try and become something different. Sarek is right: Kirk and crew have saved Spock, but at the cost of the Enterprise, their careers and David's life. It's possible this movie too could have served as the ultimate capstone to the Original Series story had it wanted to.

(There is also, of course, the inherent Pop Christianity implicit in stating Spock has an "immortal soul", which is worth a brief mention. So I'll mention it. This makes a curious contrast with the Hollywood faux-Eastern trappings the Vulcans exhibit elsewhere in this movie.) 

But of course, as is maddeningly so often the case with Star Trek, that's not quite the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock actually is. It comes very close, and the actors put in a Herculean effort here (especially the main cast and Christopher Lloyd), but this still ultimately remains a fun space action B-movie about how wonderful Star Trek is, and not just Star Trek, but a very *specific* kind of Star Trek. The Original Series was never going to end here any more than it was going to end with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: As the end credits state, “And The Adventure Continues”. Star Trek is back (and not just Star Trek, but Star Trek) and is blasting off to a new set of adventures that will be just like the old ones (or rather, how you remember the old ones to be) except now they're on the big screen. You can almost imagine seeing a bunch of text scrolling onscreen after the ending saying things like “How will Admiral Kirk and his friends escape Vulcan? Tune in next time for more exciting adventures in Outer Space!”.

Along those lines, it's interesting to note that Star Trek III: The Search for Spock marks the point where Star Trek swings so far back to its Pulp sci-fi roots it actually manages to resurrect the film serial style of storytelling, which is oddly fitting coming in the wake of Indiana Jones and Star Wars. As much as Star Trek fans may not like to admit it, this franchise really was playing catch-up and follow-the-leader for pretty much the entire decade between 1977 and 1987. But this just further reaffirms my belief that the Original Series is becoming more and more of an intellectual dead end: At this point, it seems to exist primarily as comfort food for a specific subset of Trekkers who both adamantly refuse to move on and who are for whatever reason unwilling to take the series into their own hands, despite repeated pleas to do precisely that.

(Speaking of reification and ossification, this also, of course, marks the point where that begins to happen to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Even though this film ultimately undoes everything that movie tried to do, it still holds it in a kind of reverence: The reused soundtrack, the stock footage of the climax that opens this movie and the constant invocation of it as arc words speak quite clearly to that. Flatly, Star Trek had finally done something massively popular, and now the franchise was never going to let anyone forget that ever again.)

There's a lot to love about Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Truly, there is. But, yet again, it's a bunch of good ideas and successful parts taken individually that never quite add up to a great whole, and it still continuously manages to fall short of its potential. And honestly, I'm kind of tired of constantly having to say that.

So I’ve had this song stuck in my head ever since Mark Evanier posted it as his video link of the day on Friday. This is “Little Tin Box,” from Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s musical Fiorello:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was in a community theater production of Fiorello* back in the 1990s and got to sing this one, which was great fun — fun to rehearse, fun to perform, and fun for the audience.

It’s a character song, sung by the chorus of Tammany Hall political hacks desperately defending their corruption from LaGuardia’s reforms in early 20th-century New York. The hacks take turns pretending to be the prosecutors and witnesses in those anti-corruption trials. Each, in turn, is asked to explain how it is that a public servant on a limited income has been able to afford extravagant luxuries:

Mr. X, may we ask you a question?
It’s amazing, is it not,
That the city pays you slightly less than fifty bucks a week,
Yet you’ve purchased a private yacht?

And then each, in turn, lampoons the implausible defense repeatedly attempted in those trials. It was simply a matter of frugality and prudent personal finance:

I am positive your Honor must be joking!
Any working man can do what I have done.
For a month or two I simply gave up smoking,
And I put my extra pennies one by one

Into a little tin box,
A little tin box
That a little tin key unlocks.
There is nothing unorthodox
About a little tin box. …

It’s funny stuff. I can explain that new Rolls Royce, your Honor, I collected nickels by taking empty bottles to the grocer. I skipped lunch. I carefully stewarded my pocket change.

The hacks’ defense is ridiculous — in the song and in reality — because it can’t overcome the basic arithmetic of personal thrift. It simply doesn’t add up. If you’re making $50 a week — $2,600 a year, or about $46,000 in 2014 dollars — then no matter how penny-pinching and frugal you may be, you won’t ever be able to save more than $50 a week. Your income is always going to be the upper limit on your savings and investments. Even if you give up all vices and luxuries, skip lunch, and faithfully collect all the deposits on your recyclables, it’s not possible to ever put more than that original $50 a week into your little tin box.

Everybody understands that when it comes to political corruption. That’s why we laugh at the foolish audacity of this flimsy lie from such bribe-taking grifters.

But when it comes to the working poor, everybody seems to forget the absurdity of this foolish arithmetic. The minimum wage is $7.25/hour — in constant dollars, that’s less than a third of the $50 a week these corrupt politicos were being paid in 1934. That’s $290 a week and only $15,000 a year.

And yet every day in America, people making three times as much, or ten times as much, line up for their chance to lecture these low-income workers on the merits of thrift, frugality and personal responsibility. Get rid of your cable subscription, they say. Keep your tires properly inflated. Turn the lights off when you leave the room, lower the thermostat, bring a bag lunch, learn to cook rice and beans, and check some Dave Ramsey books out of your local free public library.

Whatever the merits or demerits of such advice, and no matter how careful the adviser is to avoid victim-blaming condescension, the arithmetic is the same. It doesn’t add up.

The problem for the working poor is not that their personal expenses are too high, but that their income is too low. That doesn’t change even if they cut every expense. The arithmetic is the same whether they skip lunch once a week, or twice a week, or if they transcend human biology and forgo eating altogether.

If your income is $15,000 a year, then you will never be able to save more than $15,000 a year by being “responsible.” No amount of frugality, thrift and responsibility will ever allow you to put more than that into your little tin box.

Anyway, enjoy the video above. I hope the song doesn’t get stuck in your head, but I wish it would get stuck in Dave Ramsey’s head, and in Bill O’Reilly’s head, and in the head of every other innumerate blowhard preaching their absurd, victim-blaming BS to people who don’t need a lecture, just a damn raise.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

*That was Dorothy’s Fiorello. She was a terrific old broad — in the best sense of that term, the old-movie sense in which it was a hard-won honorific for tough women of a certain age whose good side it was best to stay on.

Fiorello was the first play Dorothy Trauberman was ever in, and so she decided it would be the last play she would direct. She wasn’t retiring, she was dying. Her doctors told her in August that there was nothing more that could be done to stop the inevitable spread of her bone cancer and that she had, at most, six months to live. She informed them that this would not do. She was directing Fiorello in the spring and would need to reschedule her death for some time after April. “I’m going to do this show and then I can die,” she told them.

And that’s what she did. She died two weeks after the show closed. I recited the Kaddish at her memorial service (as per her instructions — she insisted I be off-book and she didn’t want anyone calling for lines at her service).

 

On the ballot paper in my region there are no less than five extremist Right-wing parties.  Six if you include the Conservatives.  Apart from that there are two centrist neoliberal parties: Labour and the Liberal Democrats.  I know a fair few very nice, likeable and principled Lib Dems (online and in real life), but as a national political force the party is part of a coalition with the Tories and, as such, constitutes a de facto Right-wing party.  So that's seven Right-wing parties of various shades running from crypto-fascist to poujadist to centre-Right - none of which has any serious quarrel with the neoliberal consensus - and one centrist neoliberal party, Labour... which is now so degraded and debased that it seperates itself from the Tories and Lib Dems by a few whiskers.  Centrism has itself been shifted so far to the right that the modern Labour party is to the Right of the pre-Thatcher Tories on many issues.

That's democracy for you.  That's apparently the best we can do.  That's the freedom I'm supposed to relish and celebrate.  What a barren wasteland of horror.  What a terrifying landscape of hatred, dishonesty, bigotry and unthinking compromise.  This is politics, supposedly.  This null, anhedonic, empty, contentless, vicious, small-minded, dead, echoing, dreamless nothingness of non-choice.  This is what the best of all possible worlds looks like.

But, I'm going to vote.  Not because I want to.  Not because I like any of the 'options'.  I don't want to.  I don't like any of the 'options'.  I consider the trip to the Polling Station to be a humiliating chore that will drain me of what self-esteem I have, that will degrade and compromise me, that will implicate me.  I feel physically sick at the prospect of ticking a box on that ballot paper.  I feel that I will be signing a contract with a panorama of bullies, agreeing to let them come and kick me in the balls any time they want, agreeing to thank them afterwards, agreeing to sit by and nod and share their guilt when they rob and exploit and lie and torture and kill.  But it has to be done.

I cannot not vote against such an artillery of closed-minded, spiteful, minority-hating, jumped-up, Little Englander swine.  I cannot not vote against the BNP and UKIP and the English Democrats, etc etc etc.  I don't expect my vote against them will change anything.  Ultimately the only thing that will prevent these scum from wreaking any havoc they get a chance to wreak will be the mass mobilisation of activists against them, will be blockades and counter-demos that stop them marching, will be barricades that stop them getting into the BBC where the corporation is drooling to promote their agenda.  Ultimately, they will only be stopped when their empty heads are acquainted with pavements.  Roll on the day.  But, meanwhile, I have to vote against them.

I also cannot not vote against the current government, which is possibly the most evil and wantonly destructive in living memory, a wrecking ball being swung through the last ruins of the social-democratic consensus, through all human decency.  It is a moral obligation - I feel - to vote against the Tories and the Yellow Tories. 

If there were no Green Party candidates in my wretched, squalid, parochial, bigoted little rural shitpit of a region, then I would have to hold my nose, gird my loins, keep a grip on my stomach in the hope of not puking up my soul, and vote Labour.  My hand might wither and drop off.  Luckily, however, there are Greens to vote for.  So I'll do that. 

If I felt for a moment that abstaining from voting would achieve anything worthwhile, I would do so.  But it won't.  I don't believe that 'the vote' is a meaningful way to change society within the smothering death grip of the rotting zombie of capitalist democracy... but my disbelief in the power of the vote is also why I disbelieve in the power of the non-vote, the withheld vote.  Piffle like that is for the likes of privileged simpletons like Russell Brand.

I'm not telling anyone else what to do.  I'm just telling you what I'm going to do.

A thorn from a Varga plant. A thing part animal, part vegetable. Looks like a cactus. The poison attacks the brain. Rational thought is replaced by an overwhelming desire to kill. Eventually the poison seeps through the system and the victim is gradually transformed into a Varga.

If one of your work colleagues accidentally got themselves pricked by a nasty-looking thorn, then tried to kill you before transforming into a plant, you could be forgiven for being surprised. After all, it’s not as if it happens every day.

And there are good reasons why. Oh, the psychotic violence thing isn’t too hard, all kinds of chemicals can alter a person’s state of mind. Indeed whole industries – legal and illegal – are founded on just such self-administered manipulations, and there are plenty of drugs that have irrational bouts of violence as a side-effect.

No, it’s the whole turning into a plant bit that’s the problem. Plants and animals have fundamental differences, right down to the cellular level, from the way they extract energy from the environment to the chemicals they synthesise to keep themselves alive. The scale of the re-engineering that would be required to turn one into the other is staggering. Literally every cell would have to be changed into something new.

But let’s look at how it might be done. How do you turn a cell into a different kind of cell? It’s not easy. Even if you could somehow restructure a particular cell, the change won’t stick. You have to get right into the heart of the cell, and transform its DNA.

The chain of chemicals in your DNA contains the instructions for building and running, well, you. Every cell in your body contains a complete copy of this information. Inside your cells, tiny chemical factories run along sections of your DNA, assembling basic chemicals derived from breaking down food into constituent parts of your body. And as the cells are continually growing and dividing, they need to make copies of the DNA so that each new cell also carries this fundamental blueprint.

Although DNA is a complex chemical, it stores information in an essentially digital form. This means we can get some insight into how it works by looking at much simpler digital coding technology. A computer.

Whatever device you’re reading this on, it encodes the letter you are reading as binary numbers, strings of ones and zeroes, that are stored as electronic states within the computer’s memory. To pick a nice, simple example, let’s look at how a computer stores the word “WHO”.

In one common form of computer representation, called UTF 8-bit binary coding, every letter and character is represented by a sequence of eight ones and zeroes. So, for example, “W” is represented by the sequence 01010111, “H” by 01001000, and “O” by 01001111. This means the word “WHO”, constructed by sticking these codes together, is the sequence 010101110100100001001111.

Now let’s create a physical object that contains this code. Evolution has to make do with the raw materials available, so in that spirit let’s imagine we’re trying to do this in the fruit and veg section at Tesco.

Let’s use apricots to stand for 0, and cherries to stand for 1, stringing them together into a fruity chain of encoded information.. Our code for “WHO” then becomes ACACACCCACAACAAAACAACCCC, where “A” denotes the position of an apricot and C a cherry. To the uninitiated observer, this will just look like a particularly unsuccessful party snack, but anyone who knows the code can tell that it reads “WHO”

This is all well and good, but we want to be able to duplicate our code by some automatic process. The way nature does this with DNA goes something like this.

Take a load of tomatoes and grapes. Go along the chain of fruit, placing a tomato beside every apricot and a grape beside every cherry, sticking them to each other with a dab of jam. (You’ll probably want to use quite small tomatoes.) String your tomatoes and grapes together into another chain. You now have a more complicated double chain that looks like

You haven’t actually added any new information, though: it still just decodes to “WHO”. So why bother with all this palaver?

Well, here’s why. When it comes to reproducing this information, we can start at one end, pulling the chains apart from each other. As we do so, wherever we pull an apricot away from a tomato we attach a tomato to the exposed apricot and vice versa, and similarly for cherries and grapes. Once we’ve finished going all along the chain doing this, we end up with two separate chains that look just like the one we started with:

both of which say “WHO”.

And that’s how DNA replication works.

OK, it’s a bit more complicated than that. The fruits are chemicals called nucleobases – adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine – the string is a chain of sugars and phosphates, the jam is a set of covalent hydrogen bonds and the whole thing is twisted into a spiral structure called a double helix – but you get the idea. (I’ve also cheated a bit by using a simple binary code – in real DNA, all four nucleobases are used in the coding on each strand.) The splitting and duplication is done by a complex chemical called DNA polymerase, and various other chemical machines also play their part. You can see a real-time simulation of the process in all its complex glory in this video – it’s really quite a remarkable piece of natural engineering.

The replication of DNA that is going on right now in all the living cells in your body is vital to making sure that you stay you. It’s remarkably accurate, only making a mistake every billion copies or so – which is just as well, because mistakes mean bits of you don’t behave the way they should, and grow into tumours and the like.

Now, if we’re going to transform you into a murderous alien vegetable, we’re going to have to interrupt this process somehow, interfere with it so the system that keeps you being you goes wrong, and instead you become something else.

The most obvious way to do this would be to introduce some kind of new chemical machine, one that would process the DNA just as the polymerase in your body does, but would add different chemicals to the exposed strands. these chemicals would have to have one end that looked like the A, C, G, and T chemicals that the DNA strand is expecting to be married up with, and another end that looked like a different A, C, G, or T, so as to create a new genetic code. Once this was done, the new imposter DNA would replicate and multiply, transforming the cellular makeup of the unfortunate victim.

It would have to be very carefully contrived. Even doing a transformation like this at all is barely conceivable, but keeping the organism alive all the way through the process would require genetic programming of astonishing ingenuity. And of course the chemical sabotage machines would have to be designed specifically to work on the target species.

There’s no way something like this is just going to evolve on some distant planet, ready and waiting for the first unwitting human who crosses its path. It would have to be deliberately genetically engineered.

But who on Earth would do such a thing? All this incredible effort only results in killing a few humans who happen to be stumbling around a jungle, an effect that could be much more straightforwardly achieved with a few claymore mines.

It would have to be done by some hostile intelligence, of prodigious scientific achievement with a penchant for grandiose, overly-complex schemes and a fanatical hatred of human beings. An alien race capable of conquering the Universe, and yet regularly brought low by an eccentric old man in a travelling phone box. The answer, surely, is staring us in the face.

The Varga plants were created by the Daleks.

There’s a nice little article here about why Superman wears his underpants on the outside, which comes to the answer that the crude printing techniques meant that designs for characters had to be segmented and multicoloured, or it would be hard to understand what was going on in the picture.

But what about above the waistline? Why’s Superman wearing a leotard? There are a number of explanations. The reason that I’ve heard a number of comics’ scholars give is that it’s based on a circus strongman outfit. I’m sure strongman outfits came in all sorts of colours and designs, and I’m sure some may have had capes … although I’ve never found one.

Here’s Superman fighting someone in a strongman outfit:

I think there might be another solution. I was listening to the Knights of the White Carnation, a 1947 Superman radio serial. In that, we’re told Superman changes into his ‘jersey’.

Here’s a football jersey from the 1940s:

… and this is what Superman looks to be wearing in the early live action appearances:

 

Now, in the comics and animation, there tends to be a cleaner line, and the early versions are fairly light on detail generally, but it’s a few years down the line before Superman seems to be wearing something skintight that shows off all his muscles. Early on, he seems to be wearing something a little thicker. He fills it out, sure, but you don’t see every contour of his body.

If true, this still doesn’t explain the boots or the tights, of course …

In 1787 the Philadelphia Convention took place between May and September, to address problems in the newly formed USA. The result was the Consitituion, which included Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:

This is the first of four reruns that will surface over the course of the next two weeks.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

I don't like it.

Yeah, I said it. As far as I'm concerned, the consensus-best Star Trek EVER is a bunch of *ridiculously* overrated tat. But honestly, you must have expected this by now. Was there really ever any suspense over how I was going to read this? Surely, there was no way I was ever going to taken in by Star Trek going whole hog into Horatio Hornblower naval pomp and circumstance? Not after everything I've yelled and screamed about here for the past year. I think it's a mistake, I think it gets Star Trek's philosophy utterly wrong, I honestly don't think its a particularly captivating movie in its own right and I can't in good conscience recommend it. So there. You can all close the book or the browser tab or whatever, as I'm sure my yay or nay on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is what you've been waiting breathlessly all this time to find out about.

Anyone still here? Good. Then we can continue.

The first, most obvious problem I have with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is in fact bringing Khan back in the first place. “Space Seed” was an utterly abhorrent episode that posited Star Trek's utopian future would be built on the back of Philosopher Kings and enlightened despots who benevolently oppress us while they squabble over turf by manipulating catastrophic gang wars and indulging in extravagant, overblown dick measuring contests. It also made the passionate claim that women gain their inner strength through submissiveness and subservience and that rape culture is the natural hierarchy of humanity. And Khan himself was a spectacularly racist amalgamation of generically “exotic” nonwhite, nonwestern motifs the script bewilderingly seems to think will add to his “charm”. Charm, incidentally, is the one thing Khan wasn't hurting for simply because the show hired Ricardo Montalbán to play him, who was an amazing stage presence and the one likable thing in that whole dreadful hour.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan does at least manage to be better than “Space Seed” as it drops pretty much all of the symbolism and themes Khan was originally written with in mind, bringing him back simply to exert gravity as a powerful antagonist, which is a role he's perfectly suited for. No, Khan does work here, which is more than can be said for any of his other appearances in Star Trek, but the problem this movie has is that, by virtue of being so obviously a sequel (something I'll talk more about later on) and because it was so phenomenally well received, this retroactively makes “Space Seed” seem like it was actually a good idea to any generation of Trekker who grew up with this movie, and in doing so renders both stories completely untouchable. And *that* has done provable harm to Star Trek's legacy, because any version of Star Trek that takes “Space Seed” as the definitive display of its philosophy is a Star Trek that's inherently wrongheaded and toxic.

I'm not going to talk about the plot or anything like that: Everyone knows it by heart, even the plot holes, of which there are about a billion. No, the chronology doesn't make any sense. No, it's never explained why the most seasoned crew in the fleet is running cadet training simulations when the last time we saw them they were gearing up for a new five-year mission (though the expanded universe helps out a lot here: You're frankly spoiled for choice when it comes to stories set between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). No, Chekov shouldn't know who Khan is. And no, Khan's behaviour in regards to both Kirk and Marla McGivers doesn't make an ounce of sense. The thing is though, none of this actually matters because it's very clear this movie is meant to be a retcon in everything but name.

In spite of the fact it did make money, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was considered a critical failure, and Gene Roddenberry (rightfully) got the blame for it and was kicked upstairs basically permanently, to be replaced with a guy famous for getting paid to write Sherlock Holmes fanfic. Bringing in Nicholas Meyer is the biggest creative shift the franchise has experienced since Gene Coon came on as executive producer, and it would make sense this film would want to distance itself from its predecessor any way it could. You can see this everywhere in Wrath of Khan, from the tone and obvious naval epic influence to its loose attitude to continuity: This is a movie that's more interested in Star Trek as a cultural object than it is in any kind of established Star Trek universe. Even the aging and death themes tie into this, with Wrath of Khan feeling very much like an attempt to pass the torch to a possible new kind of Star Trek (Saavik is the key character here, as she's obviously the protagonist and obviously The New Spock).

What Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan really wants is to be a new big screen debut for the franchise, to the point it even (likely unintentionally) recycles beat-for-beat a lot of the key scenes from “In Thy Image” that were left out of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, such as McCoy trying to coax Kirk to get back in the captain's chair, and then an emergency forcing him to. Seriously, fuse Decker with Chapel and then replace them with Saavik and Admiral Nogura with Spock (and strip out absolutely all of Alan Dean Foster's utopian themes) and you've got essentially the same setup. One way to read this movie then is an alternate version of where Star Trek Phase II would have tried to go had it been made, which is basically the only thing that could possibly excuse the fact that practically the whole first half of the damn movie is stock footage from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

(And yet that said, Wrath of Khan is *also*, bewilderingly and paradoxically, the most continuity-heavy Star Trek has been yet: It requires the audience to know, for example, who Khan is and how Vulcans work. There is very little exposition of any kind here. As much as it's trying to reboot the series, it also remains firmly committed to the idea of an established canon and pleasing longtime Trekkers, and that's going to prove to be catastrophic to its overall effectiveness.)

But that's not the major issue here. On the Memory Alpha wiki, there is a *lengthy* section in the article for this movie called “Analysis”, dedicated to exploring Wrath of Khan's apparently extremely heady and complex themes such as “Age”, “Vengeance” and “Death”. This is the only Star Trek work that is given such an in-depth treatment, so obviously Trekkers, at least the Trekkers who edit Memory Alpha, think this movie is more intelligent and sophisticated than any other Star Trek, a prospect that I find gravely concerning, as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the most childishly obtuse and obvious this franchise has been since Gene Roddenberry was running it in 1966.

This movie reads like a high school English essay with the characters blatantly reciting the CliffNotes of the movie's Major Themes. It has absolutely all of the overblown and silly Big Important Speeches people accuse The Dark Knight of having, and is no more subtle when it comes to blocking and visual symbolism. I was particularly impressed with the cut in the cargo container, made as dramatically and noticeable as possible, to Khan's literature collection, which contains such obscure rarities like King Lear, Paradise Lost and Moby-Dick, helpfully reminding us precisely what he's supposed to symbolize and how we're supposed to read him just in case any of the audience had fallen asleep or happened to actually be Vulcans.

Roderick Long will want me to mention that, since this movie is basically “Star Trek Does Moby-Dick (Again)”, there's a useful redemptive reading of that book courtesy of Trotskyist and post-colonialist writer C.L.R. James we can apply that basically sees Starbuck and Ahab as representing two sides of capitalism, with the former symbolizing prudence and the latter symbolizing obsessive totalitarianism. James has a famous quote here, stating that

“For generations people believed that the men opposed to rights of ownership, production for the market, domination of money, etc. were socialists, communists, radicals of some sort united by the fact that they all thought in terms of the reorganization of society by the workers, the great majority of the oppressed, the exploited, the disinherited...Nobody, not a single soul, thought that in the managers, the superintendents, the executives, the administrators would arise such loathing and bitterness against the society of free enterprise, the market and democracy, that they would try to reorganize it to suit themselves, and, if need be, destroy civilization in the process.”

This is what James sees Ahab as: Someone who, while a product of the capitalistic system, embodies its worst excesses and resents the way it prevents him from attaining absolute control. And furthermore, someone whose extremist sense of individuality alienates him from his peers and causes him to see them as machine parts instead of human beings. And it is possible to apply at least part of that reading to what happens to Khan here, as his blind hatred for Kirk and desire for vengeance drives away his loyal crew (as symbolized by that one random guy who says a few lines and then dies pointlessly) and is ultimately his downfall.

The thing is, doing that is, to be very charitable, putting far more thought into the motif then the people writing this movie did, who very obviously did *not* intend to write a polemic against capitalism but rather wanted to reference Moby-Dick because it's a Big Important Western Literary Thing that makes them look highbrow and intellectual. It would certainly redeem a lot about Khan as a character to have him fill the role James feels Ahab plays in the original, but I simply don't see any evidence this story in particular is anything other than a hollow recitation of Moby-Dick done simply because Moby-Dick was a naval epic and Star Trek is the Space Navy again now. Add to that the use of “Amazing Grace” at Spock's funeral (unfortunately, Meyer and his team did not have the benefit of time travel and were thus unaware that Spock was fond of that poem, as we learned in “Come What May”), Kirk constantly flashing A Tale of Two Cities as if it's cash and he's a high roller at a dance club, not to mention *Genesis* itself, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan becomes a truly insufferable paean to Great White Western Culture as filtered through the lens of a New York State Regents Exam.

The other thing about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is that is looks astonishingly cheap. I don't just mean it looks like it had a smaller budget than Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which it did and is understandable because that movie's budget was obscene and ridiculous and it still looked like crap when it wasn't doing things with V'Ger. I mean this movie doesn't actually even look like a proper Hollywood blockbuster, which is...puzzling, to put it mildly, considering this was Paramount's marquee release in 1982 and meant to compete with The Empire Strikes Back and Blade Runner. There's simply no excuse for the overabundance of stock footage here: I don't care if your budget was slashed, you make a movie of this scale and get Industrial Light and Magic to do the effects and you can't get a single new shot of the Enterprise model until three quarters of the way in? Especially when you've somehow managed to make the drydock scenes look *even worse* than they did in Star Trek: The Motion Picture?

(And really, I don't mean “admirably and promisingly amateurish” or “pleasingly theatrical”, I mean “cheap”. All of the interior starship scenes are shot on what are visibly the exact same sets with no effort made to distinguish them, which is distracting and sad, and that William Shatner and Ricardo Montalbán never actually get to act off one another because Khan only appears in what are obviously pre-recorded segments is absolutely ridiculous and basically the antithesis of theatre.)

It's not that I expect or want Star Trek to look like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I do expect it to actually *try* with whatever resources it has. You don't have to have a ludicrous budget to look imaginative and inspiring: Doctor Who can do it. Raumpatrouille Orion is a bloody masterclass at it. Once we get further into the 1980s, I'll start talking about a show that absolutely revolutionized doing world-class science fiction on an Ed Wood budget. Even the Original Series *itself* wasn't terrible at this: It didn't start to look cash-starved until invisible one-way exploding spaceships started showing up and we began to do episodes about empty Enterprise stage sets. This though, looks and feels like every bit of the drab, grey and uninspired military affair it is.

The big problem is that this is simply not good enough for a marquee Hollywood blockbuster, which by its very nature needs to have an element of spectacle about it. But this brings us to an interesting revelation: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan isn't actually a marquee Hollywood blockbuster in spirit, even if in practice it was supposed to be: It's a B-movie. Granted, just about nobody involved is treating it as anything *other* than a B-movie (just look at the acting, especially in the big emotional moments, in particular William Shatner and DeForest Kelley), but the fact is that's what this is. And this is interesting, because it *also* wants to be a deathly serious war epic and a story about aging. And this genre and that narrative structure have never really overlapped before. But while it has the trappings of a B-movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan lacks the art house enthusiasm of something like Eraserhead, the niche appeal of a horror movie or the the campy escapist fun of any of the cult classics. It is, somewhat tragically, a B-movie that doesn't realise it's a B-movie.

Yeah, OK, I'll briefly talk about Spock's death.

I mean, there's not a whole lot to say about it, aside from the acknowledged clever double feint of having him die in the simulation early on to cover up for the fact the initial draft of the story leaked. Leonard Nimoy wanted to retire from Star Trek again, which is something of a hobby of his, and wouldn't do the movie unless Spock was killed off. So he was. It was, understandably, a big emotional moment for fandom and one of the most memorable images from the franchise's history. No need to go over that again. A few things that stick out to me about this scene that I don't think are commented on a lot: One, everything leading up to the actual death scene is completely laughable and ridiculous: Spock just gets up, as if he got a cue from off camera and then heads down to the irradiated engineering deck as if to say “Welp. Guess it's time to die now”, where he proceeds to just wreck all of the shit in sight with no particular method or purpose while DeForest Kelley and James Doohan try their absolute hardest to give the single most hilarious, overblown and impossible-to-take-seriously tragic monologue in history.

The other thing about this scene though, is that it's an absolute perfect microcosm for this movie's ambition...and its shortcomings. Because killing off Spock happens to be incredibly symbolic, considering he is the most iconic aspect of the Original Series story and arguably the character who symbolizes it the best, both diegetically and extradiegetically. Those comparisons I made to “In Thy Image” above? Those musings about how this could have laid the groundwork for a new Star Trek? That was precisely the point. Not only was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan meant to be the “new” Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it was also meant to be the *last* Star Trek Motion Picture. Those aging motifs may have the relative subtlety of your average blunderbuss, but Meyer put them in for a reason: This is very clearly and explicitly an attempt to end Star Trek as a mass market Soda Pop Art franchise. In many ways we're back in the territory of Star Trek: The New Voyages: The new status quo is established with Saavik, The New Spock (and really, The New Kirk as well), ready to take charge of a new generation of Star Trek, which is to be left in the capable hands of the fans to take wherever they want her to go.

But...

How many times has Star Trek tried to kill itself off by now? Like, five or six, by my count already? How do you think that was going to take? There's no way Paramount was going to let its primary cash cow disappear, and so we get a stonking great sequel hook where Spock's casket lands on the Genesis planet and every single bloody character makes unbelievably unsubtle comments about “new life”. Yeah, no, contrary to popular belief it's not the next movie that zombifies the Star Trek film franchise, it's this one. Even *without* knowing the next movie is called Star Trek III: The Search for Spock its impossible *not* to assume a sequel is going to be imminent looking at the last shots of this movie. It's as obvious as anything else this movie does, and Harve Bennett, who wrote the initial draft of the script, is on record saying Paramount immediately contracted him to write Star Trek III before this film was even released. The studio simply couldn't leave it alone, so Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ends up feeling utterly pointless on top of everything else that's unsatisfying about it.

Is this a better movie than Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Well, I suppose so, simply by virtue of it having things like actual scripted dialogue instead of making the actors recite flight training manuals and pacing that resembles something human beings might film rather than primeval stone-giants. And, much of the acting is well done and suitable for the setting: Special props must go to Kirstie Alley and Bibi Besch, both of whom give absolute first-rate performances and the latter of whom perfectly embodies what James T. Kirk's wife would be-Someone every bit as commanding and driven as he is. But, when the smoke clears and Khan gets his final Epic Villain Monologue, the fact Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a B-movie that doesn't want to admit it's a B-movie and that Trekkers actually think this is an erudite and sophisticated cinematic masterpiece say it all for me. This movie is every bit as self-absorbed and pretentiously middlebrow as its predecessor, it just doesn't *look* like it anymore.

In many ways, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan really is the definitive Star Trek movie: It's a solidly executed translation of the blunt, ham-fisted moralizing and blatant militarism that characterized the early Original Series to film. Perhaps that's why this movie is as beloved as it is. And why I can't stand it.

On following rules.

I sometimes think of it like he’s from a different planet. Every time he talks about how persecuted the rich are, or how feminism is turning our kids into homosexuals, or how my “people” wouldn’t understand this or that because we aren’t really part of the great Western tradition, I pretend that he’s from an alien world where everything is completely different. It’s easier that way. It’s hard to judge a guy too harshly for talking a lot of bullshit when he’s a space alien.
—
“Lawrence, do you listen to that rap music?”

“No, sir, Mr. Kendall.”

“I understand it is very popular with your people.”

“I like jazz mostly.”

“I realize you may think that it tells true stories of the urban streets. But as long as you wallow in your own despair, and celebrate your degradation, your people will remain in that despair and degradation.”

“I don’t really even pay attention to it, Mr. Kendall.”

“It glorifies everything that is ugly and wrong. There is nothing uplifting about it, as an artistic medium, Lawrence.”

“I’m sure you’re right, sir.”

“Our culture is at war, Lawrence. Don’t be on the losing side.”

Conversations like this are putting my kids through college. They both love rap.
—
Lately his big thing is the Muslims. He’s convinced that they’re responsible for the downturn in the economy, and that there’s an Islamic fifth column working inside the United States to bring the country down. Like subversives or something. He thinks every Muslim is an Arab and vice versa. He sends the girls out to get him food and stuff, so he rarely sees anyone, but when he goes into the city for banquets or speaking engagements or to meet with the other owners, he always has some story about seeing a guy in a turban or a skullcap causing trouble. He won’t ride in cabs anymore at all. Now Henry has to shuttle him around everywhere in the car.
Of course, Henry is happy to get the extra work.
—
“You’re not a Muslim, are you, Lawrence?”

“No, sir, Mr. Kendall.”

“I understand that a lot of your people have foolishly embraced Islam.”

“Not me, sir.”

“It’s not a religion of peace, Lawrence. It’s a religion of hate. Don’t fall prey to the apologist propaganda.”

“I’m a Baptist.”

“You should be very proud of yourself. So few people make the effort to assimilate.”

“Well, actually, I was born in Florida.”

“Insisting on keeping your cultural norms is what’s Balkanizing America.”
—
There’s a lot of things I’ve noticed about people from his planet. It would be nice to think that they all looked like crazy lizard monsters or something, but they don’t. Mr. Kendall is actually a really handsome man, for a guy his age. And they’re not completely alien, either. He treats the animals really well, and he pays us a hell of a lot of money. And not everything about his world is different: he gets nervous about pollution sometimes, and he likes kids, and we both believe in a similar God, although his is a lot angrier than mine is. One thing’s for sure, though: the people from his world are scared, all the time. Everyone’s out to get them, especially homosexuals, terrorists, and rampaging hordes of poor people who are all jumped up on crack. And they don’t have any natural defenses, these aliens. So when they get scared, they call people like me.

“Your people have an innate gift for dealing with the criminal element”, he says.

I used to feel bad about getting paid so much to sit around and do nothing all day (the aliens use our currency, thank the Lord), but he makes a lot more money than I do, and he doesn’t do any work either. His assistant, Mr. Cornell, also comes from the alien planet, although he’s more deep-cover than the old man. He writes all of Mr. Kendall’s op-ed articles. It’s funny, because he makes all the staff sign this confidentiality agreement saying that they’ll never reveal that Kendall’s column is ghostwritten. I guess on their world, nobody knows. On my world everybody knows, and nobody cares. The only people who think it’s a secret are the other aliens. They don’t even bring it up when they’re visiting the house; it would be like farting at daddy’s dinner party. I don’t think they write their own columns either.
—
“Lawrence, I’d like you to run a background check on the girl who delivers breakfast.”

“What for, sir? She seems pretty harmless.”

“It’s a pity that I have to do your job for you, Lawrence. I hired you as a security specialist, and here I am doing the work of protecting myself.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Her name. Her name is Ali.”

“Uh…sir?”

“That’s an Arab name, Lawrence.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s not an Arab, Mr. Kendall.”

“It’s deceiving to go by appearances, Lawrence. Did you know that Mrs. Brandon, who tends to the dogs, is one of your people? She’s what they call a ‘high yellow’. It’s a term.”

“I think the ‘Ali’ stands for ‘Alison’.”

“Look into it, Lawrence. I don’t want to ask you again.”

I might put in some overtime. I’m thinking about buying a boat.

Prisoner of Azkaban, the third Harry Potter book, is also the third I’ve read to my 7-year old. The rule has been “one a year”, mostly because I know the series ramps up the level of darkness and anxiety, but also because once we hit the pagecount explosion of Book 4 I’m keener to pass the job on to him.

There’s some indication, I think, that this is how Rowling expects things to go. The first two books are really exceptionally good for reading aloud – clear storytelling, distinctive character voices, a steady flow of new ideas and exciting incidents, and evocative but simple description.

By HP3, that’s starting to change. The narrative is getting more sophisticated not just emotionally but technically. Crowd scenes are rendered with snatches of unattributed dialogue. Lists of books include parenthetical excerpts. These are ultra standard techniques, and a child reader gets the point of them very quickly. A reader aloud has more trouble making them work. They simply aren’t meant to be bedtime stories.

There’s also a lot more worldbuilding going on. The Potter books mostly start with a relative lull, then spend a lot of time on the books’ stock antagonisms (vs Dudley, vs Malfoy, vs Snape) while introducing new characters and quietly moving plot elements around in the background. There’s enough drama in the running enmities to make each night’s reading exciting even before the layered payoffs start hitting. But in HP3 not only are there even more spells, artefacts and magical concepts to deal with, there are huge chunks of backstory exposition, which have to be delivered in ever longer talking heads sequences.

Thankfully, these are pretty exciting bits of exposition, all about betrayal and murder. But the introduction of Sirius Black – the living link to Harry’s parents and past – crosses a rubicon. The B story he brings with him – the lives of the previous generation of Hogwarts’ students – never fades out: it gets more and more important (and hence the expository scenes get more crucial) across all the rest of the novels.

So this is a pivot point in Harry Potter. The books start as a kids’ series, and end it as something closer to a Young Adult one. A lot of older readers – me included – are reading it alongside their kids and like the kids’ end more, or at least think JK Rowling is better at handling it. And so Prisoner of Azkaban is a favourite, as it’s Rowling pushing the magical school story with its domino-topple plot as far as it can go. But if you look at 20something Harry Potter fans on Tumblr, they react to the sturm und drang of later books more – which get more and more influenced by that previous-generation B-plot, all about the consequences of teenage friendships and crushes, which is a much more YA set of ideas.

If the series had started out with the Young Adult mentality – i.e. if it had always been meant to be read by bright 13-14 year olds, not 10-year olds – maybe it would have gone for an Alan Garner type narrative (or one like Stephen King’s IT): two generations of storytelling in parallel, so you could trace the resonances between them and see how mistakes and decisions influenced each other. But that’s not how the series was set up – it’s Harry’s story, with the B-plot of 1970s Hogwarts existing as eggs laid inside it, slowly hatching.

The main consequence of this, it seems to me, is that the role of the adults in the books shifts dramatically. HP3 is the first book in which intra-adult dislike is a plot motor (as opposed to a joke – everyone thinking Lockhart is a dick, for instance). Snape hating Lupin is important, and requires kid readers to have a way of grasping and relating to adults’ interior lives and motives, which they won’t really have until a certain age. In the first and second books, the adults basically fill standard adventure fiction roles – their point is to be incomprehending enemies or wise mentors, while the kids carry the adventure. HP3 changes all that – the climactic scenes in the Shrieking Shack are all about four grown men dealing with that they did or didn’t do when young, while the child protagonists of the books are mainly onlookers.

I say “grown men”, but that’s the problem. Younger kid readers basically don’t have much of a way of grasping adult interiority – which isn’t to say kidlit can’t be sharply observational about adult actions and justifications, of course. Teenage fiction, on the other hand, is or should be excellent at capturing teenage motivation and interior lives. So that’s what the prior-generation characters – the motor of the series’ shift towards young-adult status – get defined by. What Snape, Lupin, Black et al. did at school and just after defines their entire role in the books and their emotional motivations: an unresolved teenage crush isn’t just character-defining, it’s the twist the entire seven-book series ends up resting on. By the end, Harry Potter is a book about teenage teenagers and adult teenagers and dead teenagers, which is its power and appeal and why I am stopping reading aloud after this third book, where the slow roll towards that endpoint begins.