Andrew Hickey

NBC television has a new 10-episode miniseries this fall called Dracula. It’s based on the famous vampire from Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic novel.

I’ve never read Stoker’s novel. I’m not sure I could. I’m not sure any of us could. It’s still in print and readily available — you can download a free ebook version here, or read it online if you like. But those of us sitting here, in 2013, will still have a very hard time reaching back to 1897 to read the book as Stoker intended it to be read or as its first readers read it at the turn of the last century.

Stoker’s language and style may seem a bit archaic, but that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that Stoker introduced symbols and characters and creatures that have, for more than a century, been redefined, reinterpreted and re-presented dozens of times over. If I go back to the original book and encounter those symbols, I can’t help but bring with me all the new meanings that have attached to them over the intervening years.

When Stoker wrote of “Dracula” and “vampires” and “Transylvania” he did not and could not have meant all the things that I cannot help but take those words to mean, to imply, to connote. It would require enormous effort on my part — not just willpower, but extensive research and scholarship — to encounter Stoker’s words and symbols without all that extra and extraneous meaning those words and symbols have since collected and accreted. I’m not sure that project could ever be wholly successful.

The cover of the first edition of the book shown here has just four words on it, but it’s immensely difficult to read even those four words without importing and imposing a vast amount of information they don’t actually contain. The “Dracula” I already know is not the same thing as the “Dracula by Bram Stoker.” My Dracula includes a thousand things Bram Stoker never dreamed of — Bela Lugosi and the Universal movies, Ed Wood and Abbot and Costello, Buffy, Twilight, The Lost Boys, Sesame Street, Count Chocula, Nosferatu, Willem Dafoe, Barnabas Collins, Salem’s Lot, True Blood, Louis and Lestat, and dozens of other things I’ve forgotten reading or watching even though their influence lingers, unacknowledged.

Here are the opening paragraphs of Stoker’s novel:

3 May. Bistritz.—Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.

We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called “paprika hendl,” and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians. I found my smattering of German very useful here; indeed, I don’t know how I should be able to get on without it.

Having had some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps in the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a nobleman of that country. I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina.

In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the South, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the West, and Szekelys in the East and North. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns. This may be so, for when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they found the Huns settled in it. I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.)

That’s written as a journal entry by Jonathan Harker — a character portrayed and revisited so many times that he has his own IMDB page with dozens of entries. It’s not easy to encounter him there in Stoker’s novel without some of those many portrayals reshaping what I read.

When Stoker’s first readers encountered that passage, they couldn’t know what awaited Harker at the end of his journey. We can’t help but know — or can’t help but think we know. This story is familiar to us, but the story we’re familiar with is not identical to the story Stoker is telling. And so, for us today, the story Stoker is telling may be inseparable from the story we’re already familiar with.

Stoker’s original story is, for us today, at the center of some sort of imaginative whirlpool. And so it is, for us, an enormous challenge to encounter that story itself — as itself — without being influenced by all the allusions and accretions swirling around it, on top of it, under it and through it.

All of this presents a challenge for Cole Haddon and Daniel Knauf, the creators of that new Dracula show for NBC. How will they choose to tell this story? What version or versions of the story will they choose to tell?

One approach would be to attempt a faithful adaptation — painstakingly separating the original tale from all the later cultural additions and reinterpretations of it. That’s a tricky business, first of all because it’s hard. “Faithful adaptation” may be an oxymoron. One can be faithful, or one can adapt, but it may not always be possible to do both at once. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula took this approach, but as that awkward double attribution suggests, that film didn’t so much give us Stoker’s Dracula as it did Coppola’s Stoker.

Another problem with the “faithful adaptation” approach is that it tends to upset some of Dracula’s fans. Their idea of what’s “canonical” may be only a loosely overlapping Venn diagram with Stoker’s original canon. Cut away all of the extraneous later additions that have attached themselves over time to the original story and you’ll be cutting away many fans’ favorite parts. If Jonathan Rhys Myers is more like Stoker’s Dracula than like Bela Lugosi, that’s bound to disappoint some viewers who wanted to see Lugosi, or to upset others for whom Gary Oldman represents the “authentic” Count. Fans may be frustrated if Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s Jonathan Harker turns out to be nothing like Keanu Reeves. (OK, yes, that last bit is a joke.)

And so a second approach would be to set aside the difficult project of separating the original from the expanded cultural phenomenon. Instead of trying to faithfully adapt Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the creators of the show might choose to tell a story about our Dracula — the character we all know or think we know today, complete with all of the additions and subtractions, elaborations, amendments and emendations. This approach is easier, but no less complicated and no less fraught with the danger of disappointing the fans because it requires a host of choices about which parts of “our” Dracula to keep and which to cast aside.

These two approaches seem almost like opposites. The first says that the story is what the text says, and that our task is thus to cut away and to cut through everything else to try to get back to the pure, unspoiled essence of the original, authoritative text. The second says that the story is ours, not just Stoker’s, and so Stoker is just one of many participants in a community. In the second approach, then, our task becomes sorting through all the many contributions from the many voices in that community to locate at the center that which seems most true to our story.

In practice, though, these two very different approaches are never quite so abstract and separate as they may seem. The unspoiled original and authoritative text will always be determined and interpreted by the community that belongs to it and to which it belongs. It’s words and symbols and characters can never mean anything wholly separate from what they mean to that community. And Stoker’s voice will always have a privileged place in that community of voices, his original words will always be there at the center, no matter how large the imaginative whirlpool swirling around them grows to be.

And but so anyway, I titled this post “‘Dracula’ and the Bible,” and now I’ve gone on and on about the Bible without hardly even mentioning Dracula. Sorry about that.

A commission of 80 executives, choreographers and dancers recently introduced a plan they say will revitalize ballet in America by reinvigorating artistic freedom.

With all due respect, I think their plan is a terrible idea. If enacted, it would mean the end of ballet in America. In the name of artistic freedom, these folks would destroy the art form, replacing it with something else — something completely unrecognizable, something that has little to do with dance or art or freedom.

Ballet societies and academies are non-profit institutions. They sell tickets and subscriptions, and they pay salaries and utility bills, but most could not survive with a for-profit business model. They depend on the generosity of their loyal donors.

Those donors are able to be so generous because their donations are tax-deductible charitable contributions. That charitable tax status is the lifeblood of the ballet, but it is also a privilege that comes with certain rules and restrictions. Those restrictions, the commission says, are a threat to artistic freedom.

Specifically, the commissioners say their freedom is hobbled by the rule that forbids tax-deductible charities from political campaigning, electioneering and endorsing candidates for political office.

What does any of that have to do with ballet? you ask. But that’s exactly the commissioners’ point. It shouldn’t be for you, or me, or the IRS, or anyone else to decide what is germane to their art. Artistic freedom cannot be constrained and still be called “freedom.” We may think that the rules for tax-deductibility are perfectly reasonable, but those rules limit that artistic freedom and thus, in the commissioners’ view, the IRS is meddling and interfering with their ability to be artists, to follow their art wherever it leads them.

The commissioners demand, then, to be allowed to keep their tax-deductible status, but without any of the restrictions that go along with it for every other charitable organization. They demand that the ballet be permitted full, unfettered artistic freedom — including the freedom to endorse candidates for political office and to participate in partisan campaigning and electioneering.

One obvious objection to this plan is that the commissioners do not seem to understand what the privilege of their tax-free charitable status means. They are demanding — in the name of art — that they be given special rights without any corresponding responsibilities. They are demanding what would be, in effect, a special no-strings-attached subsidy paid to them by taxpayers.

That’s not a problem just because it would give them an extra-special privilege at the expense of everyone else. It’s also a problem because such a scheme would drastically restrict their artistic freedom. It’s effect would be the opposite of what they claim to want.

The government subsidy the commissioners are demanding would be a form of establishment as a kind of official artistic branch of the government. The commissioners imagine that such establishment could happen without any corresponding intrusion of public accountability for how it spends that subsidy, but that’s a fairy tale. Public funding will always, ultimately, entail some form of public accountability, and they would inevitably become entangled in state business in a way that would severely constrain the very artistic freedom they’re claiming to champion.

But set aside such concerns about the establishment of official, state-sponsored art and let’s just consider what would happen first if the commissioners’ wish were granted: It would very quickly destroy ballet in America.

Imagine that you are a partisan political billionaire — like Art Pope or one of the Kochs or Waltons. Right now, you’re spending millions of dollars every year to promote your political agenda. You’re pleased with the return you’re seeing on that investment, but it’s still quite an expense. You’re writing checks to candidates all over the country, and you’re writing checks to the party at national, state and local levels, and you’re writing even more checks to various committees, PACs and Super-PACs.

Those political contributions are not tax-deductible. If the commissioners’ plan were enacted, though, you could write checks to the ballet instead — tax-deductible checks that could still be used to fund and promote the same partisan political purposes as the checks you’re writing now. It would be a simple matter to ensure that these donations to “the arts” would be spent mainly on the same politicking, electioneering and lobbying you’re funding now. (You simply make that a condition for your multi-million-dollar donations.)

If you are a rational economic actor presented with this choice — a $100 million expense vs. a $100 million tax deduction — you would be a fool not to redirect most of your political spending into the new outlet, the new outlet incentivized by the commission’s plan.

The only problem would be that these ballet companies lack the capacity and the expertise to handle all of that political money and to rechannel it into effective lobbying and campaigning. So the next step, obviously, would be for them to start hiring — using your contributions to endow all the new staff positions they would need to effectively handle all the money now rushing their way. Their small staffs of artistic directors, music directors and choreographers would be vastly expanded to include political directors, campaign consultants, pollsters, direct-mail fundraising experts, canvassers, speechwriters, aides, lobbyists, lawyers, lawyers, lawyers, and all the rest.

This new staff would outnumber the vestigial original staff and would quickly set about transforming the ballet into an effective political machine. The ballet’s mailing list of subscribers and supporters would be vastly expanded, segmented and exploited into a tax-free communications and political-fundraising powerhouse. New offices would be leased — not necessarily anywhere near the ballet’s performance and rehearsal spaces — where all the lobbyists and consultants could carry out the work of the perpetual media campaign that is modern politics.

The ballet itself would continue, of course. The dancers would still dance. But art would become an ever-shrinking fraction of a vastly expanding budget.

Maybe that’s what the commissioners are hoping for. If you’re running a struggling non-profit limping along with a $1 million annual budget, it might seem like a windfall to be transformed into the artistic wing of a political machine receiving, say, 5 percent of a $100 million annual budget. That might mean finally renovating the stage, replacing that old boiler, patching the leaky roof, hiring a larger orchestra …

That promises increased financial freedom — a wave of cash that’s desperately needed. But it would be foolish to think this influx of political money would mean an increase in artistic freedom. Artistic concerns would become, in practice, just what they are in the ballet’s new, vastly larger budget — a tertiary concern, an afterthought, and a tiny fraction of the larger agenda.

And we haven’t even yet mentioned the potentially devastating effect that this new, partisan political identity could have — dividing the ballet’s audience and chasing off many of the dancers, composers and choreographers it needs to fulfill its mission.

The commissioners say they’re friends of the ballet. They’re posing as champions of artistic freedom. But their plan is a terrible idea that would, in practice, destroy the ballet and abolish artistic freedom.

I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t their intent.

So, ASDA thought it was a good idea to put up a gruesome Hallowe'en outfit and bill it as a "mental patient's" outfit.

Gee, thanks. That sort of stereotype of people with mental health problems is why I lost my teens to Depression and a good bit of my 20s to Depression and Anxiety. If it had been easier to talk about these things, maybe, just maybe, I'd have had the help I needed sooner. Encouraging such awful and inaccurate stereotypes is offensive and irresponsible

What gets me is that more than one person must have seen that before it went live. Why did it not ring alarm bells with them? It just shows how deeply prejudices are engrained and how much we still have to do to challenge the stigma of mental illness.

But, anyway, it's fine now. ASDA have apologised and donated a sum to a mental health charity. Actually, not, it's not. They deserve to take some punishment for ever having done it in the first place. It dawned on me that a day's boycott is the very least that they deserve.

With Scottish Mental Health Awareness Week beginning on 4th October, it dawns on me that Saturday 5th might be a good day to ask people not to shop there.

Tesco and Amazon, too, have been guilty of the same sort of thing, so they can share the pain, too. And anyone else who thinks it's ok to cast people with mental illness in that way, making it more difficult for them to seek the help that they need. You worry how your family, your friends, your employer would react enough without these stores planting the ridiculous idea that you're about to run amok with a meat cleaver.

There are times when saying sorry isn't enough, and this is one of them.

Dear David Blunkett,

I was surprised and disturbed by your somewhat revisionist historical analysis. In case you’ve forgotten the speech you gave, these is the alarming sentiments you articulated:

“The Lib Dems in Glasgow debated this and decided they were against automatic protection unless people chose to over-ride it, in terms of pornography on the internet and the protection of children. I think they were wrong.

“I think we have a job in this country, in a civilised, free, open democracy, to protect ourselves from the most bestial activities and from dangers that would undermine a civilised nation.

“In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Berlin came as near as dammit to Sodom and Gomorrah. There was a disintegration of what you might call any kind of social order.

“People fed on that – they fed people’s fears of it. They encouraged their paranoia. They developed hate about people who had differences, who were minorities.

“There always has had to be some balance, in terms of the freedom of what we want to do, for ourselves and the mutual respect and the duty we owe to each other in a collective society. I think getting it right is the strength of a democracy.”

See, the thing is, David, I’m not convinced that Weimar was the worst era in modern German history. It was a pretty decent time to be queer, really; we were accepted. It also wasn’t too bad to be a woman: our sexual agency was accepted and abortion was actually legalised in some cases, almost a century ago! The music was cool: they embraced music like jazz. It was progressive, in short, and marginalised people were treated more like humans than the little bit of history that came later.

That little bit of history that came later, David, was Nazi Germany, the spectre you raise as a consequence of not treating marginalised people like shit. Those who were accepted in the Sodom and Gomorrah times suffered heavily under Nazi Germany. The queers were forced to wear pink triangles and herded into camps, murdered in droves by the state. The women were treated as breeding machines, nothing more than a means of reproduction. The rich art and culture made by people who were not white, once embraced, was now illegal, degenerate. It was a period of history which sucked absolutely enormously for basically everyone who was not a straight, cis, able-bodied white man.

For some reason, you think this was the responsibility of exactly the people who suffered the most. You know who else thought that? Hitler.

I am writing to you, David, to express concern because I am fairly sure that you have ripped a hole in the space-time continuum by twisting Godwin’s Law so much. I presume you’re decrying Nazism and saying it’s bad, while simultaneously using some rhetoric with a distinctly fascist flavour. Of course I’ll help out if some of the Sleeping Ones awaken and pass through the portal you have opened, but I’m a little annoyed that I have to, to be perfectly honest.

On the other hand, David, I’m grateful. What could I possibly be grateful for, when you are essentially blaming millions for their own genocide?

I am grateful, David, that you have laid bare the inherent authoritarianism in the moralistic attitude towards banning porn. I am relieved to see that you have managed to point out that ultimately this isn’t about porn itself, but it is far wider, and far more chilling. It is rooted in a hatred of all that is not straight, a rejection of sexual freedom for women. It reflects a disgust at the queer. You have demonstrated this with your words far more clearly than all of the commentary that comes from the marginalised.

So fuck you, and all who share your views. You frighten and sicken me, as do all who agree with you.

No love,

Stavvers

EDIT 02/10/13: I made Blunkett feel sad.

Tuesday:

Just when you thought Hard Labour conference was going along nicely, copycatting all our Liberal Democrat policies – tax cuts for low-income workers, check; paid for by a mansion tax, check; more apprentices, check; more affordable and social houses, check; garden cities, check; votes at sixteen, check; net nannying, check (no, hang on, we voted to refer that back!) – when along comes Mr Milipede’s leader’s speech with a totally unexpected policy to capture the headlines freeze (for twenty months) the prices that companies can charge for energy.

I don’t know whether it’s a work of genius or lunacy.

It’s clearly pitched as a “game-changer”, after the fashion of Master Gideon’s 2007 Conference announcement of a cut in Inheritance Tax for dead millionaires that so derailed Mr Frown’s plans for a snap general election. As such it’s much more political than practical.

In practice it’s a four-and-a-half billion pound windfall tax on the profits of the energy companies, distributed directly to energy users.

(Obviously that’s a hugely regressive tax giveaway as it will benefit rich people with large houses and big companies with large energy bills much more than the less well off, an “energy cut for millionaires” as Hard Labour might call it, if the Coalition had suggested it.)

There’s also a serious question of who pays this four-and-a-half billion pounds. Four-and-a-half billion pounds is quite a lot of money and it’s going to come from somewhere. And the answer isn’t just “the energy companies”, because companies are just people really, and money that companies make gets paid out, either in salaries or to the shareholders. It’s not just the money paid to shareholders that is affected by this profit hit – companies may choose to cut bonuses, curb salaries, or just plain axe jobs to claw back some of the cost of Mr Milipede’s largesse with other people’s cash. But let’s assume that it mainly hit’s the shareholders: that’s fat cats in the city right? Well again, not really.

Of the “big six”, Centrica and SSE plc (formerly Scottish and Southern Energy) are British-owned, quoted on the London Stock Exchange and are FTSE100 companies; npower, as a subsidiary of RWE, and E.ON are usually described as German-owned, but like their British equivalents they are public companies listed on the German stock exchange and are members of the blue chip DAX index; similarly Scottish Power are a subsidiary of Spanish company Iberdrola who are quoted on the Spanish IBEX 35. The one of those kids doing her own thing is EDF (Électricité de France), Europe’s largest energy supplier, providing power to more than a fifth of the continent, including us (Mr Farage, take note). Although theoretically privatised and quoted on the Euronext exchange, the French government remains the largest shareholder, owning 85% of the shares.

Crudely speaking our energy generating capacity is owned by: 23% British, 34% German, 9% Spanish, 17% French and 17% smaller companies (including the Irish EDS and France’s GDF-Suez).

But because they’re almost all publically quoted, anyone with a European portfolio – and that means most British pension funds and British Insurance companies – would ultimately be affected. Yes, a fair amount of that pain would be “exported” to our no doubt very grateful friends in the European Union, so that’s fine isn’t it – let’s shaft French and German pensioners instead of our own.

And don’t think the French government wouldn’t be narked. I mean it’s not like they’ve got a history of hauling Britain in front of the European Courts… oh…

But the practical considerations of setting your face against the worldwide trend in energy inflation or launching another raid on pension funds or pissing off Europe again, even without getting into the legal challenges from the six power companies that have sewn up the UK energy market, are almost neither here nor there.

It’s bound to be very popular, isn’t it. The energy companies, after all, are disliked almost as much as Mr Milipede (maybe not as much as Cap’n Clegg). More importantly, it’s going to be popular between now and the general election in May 2015, and never mind whether or not Hard Labour ever have to implement it. (Remember, Master Gideon’s “Tax Cut for Dead Millionaires” was merrily traded away in Coalition negotiations in 2010!).

And it helps to move the agenda onto the territory that Hard Labour want to play on: away from the wreckage of the economy that they left in 2010 (and whether or not the recovery is enough to mean the Coalition have fixed it) and onto their so-called “cost of living crisis” where people as individuals feel very small and disempowered against these large (and largely privatised) companies that seem only to put their prices up and up, and widening the gap between the end of the money and the end of the month.

(Hard Labour’s part in setting up these massive near-monopolies – the mergers that turned a “Big Ten” energy companies into a “Big Six”, say, taking place between 2006 and 2010… who was Energy and Climate Change Secretary at that time? – all quietly swept under the carpet. Just as with shifting their complicity with the Banks for the crash, “Big Business = Tories” sells too easily for any blame to stick.)

Clearly it’s better to be known as “Red Ed” than as “Mr Nobody”, and – like Master Osborne – with one bound Mr Milipede has re-established his reputation. He makes a very good story out of joining the dots, too, from his “squeezed middle” via “ predators v producers” to this. (Though I’m ever so reminded of the Dr Woo story “The Curse of Fenric”: not because of “something nasty rising up from the sea” in Brighton, but for taking disparate and unconnected plot points and post-facto justifying them as a “story arc in retrospect”.)

He’s certainly created “clear red water” between himself and the Conservatories (possibly making Cap’n Clegg’s positioning of the Liberal Democrats as the moderate middle look wise in the process). And ironically – after a summer spent trying to distance himself from the Unions that got him elected – he’s made the Unions very happy with this apparent rediscovery of Socialism. Or at least Statism.

Big, sweeping State interventions are the stuff of Old Hard Labour’s Sixties and Seventies heyday, when then Industry Secretary (and now darling of the Left) Tony Benn would impose massive mergers on British industrial sectors – computing, motor cars – and… well how did that work out? Or to put it another way, why don’t we have a British computing or motor car industrial base anymore?

(There’s got to be something wrong with the thinking of a man who diagnoses the problem as “the Civil Service stands in the way of progressive change” and the cure as “Nationalise all industry… into the hands of the Civil Service”. Maybe get back to us on that, Tony.)

There’s even an element of the Social Market in it that might appeal to Liberal Democrat hearts – note that even I’m not wholly ruling this out as an idea – with Milipede justifying his sweeping – and entirely arbitrary – market intervention as a “correction” when the market has “failed”. How exactly has the market “failed” though? Repeated MMC investigations have failed to turn up evidence that the power companies are collaborating. And Tesco makes a higher profit margin that several of the “Big Six”. Are we suggesting that the government should freeze Tesco’s prices too? I suppose, every little helps.

But it doesn’t just end there, does it. If Mr Milipede can wave his wand and, on a whim, freeze the price of one group of supposedly private companies, why not wave it again over the price of, say, houses? Everyone agrees that house prices are too high, so how would you feel if Prime Monster Milipede just declared that the value of your house was halved? (Not your mortgage, just the house. Can you say: whoops negative equity?) Not similar? Well, people will have paid money for shares in the power companies; arbitrarily freezing the income of those companies cuts the value of those shares just like that too. Pity if it was your pension pot that suddenly fell short.

This is where we get to the real problem – and the real danger - of Mr Milipede’s rabbit-from-the-hat policy announcement. In the Sixties and Seventies, the government thought it could “pick winners” and it did it very badly. Mr Milipede thinks that he can “pick villains”. What if he is just as wrong?

When that other Phoney Tony, Lord Blairimort (what is it with Tony B’s?) got into Downing St, New Hard Labour discovered that pulling the levers of government didn’t change things as quickly as they wanted, if at all. Their solution? More levers!

Mr Milipede appears to have discovered the Mother of all levers.

It is genius. But it is lunacy.

PS:

Edited to add:

Beaten to the punch by Alisdair at Lib Dem Voice with similar points: "terrible economics but excellent politics".

Factcheck response: "skeptical".

Wednesday:

This week I thought Ed Balls got something right.

It’s a good idea to get Labour’s budget plans audited by the Office for Budget Responsibility. The Liberal Democrats have long asked the IFS to check our figures; it would be very useful to voters to have an independent eye scrutinise the numbers of all the parties to have choice based on priorities not dogma. And it would make Mr Balls spell out Hard Labour’s policies well in advance of the election.

I just don’t think that makes him the fiscal paragon that Polly Toytown seems to think he is.

Iron Balls, Polly? Really?

Yes, I know I shouldn’t read the Grauniad. Especially not Pollyanna Toytown and her increasingly absurd hagiography of the Hard Labour hierarchy.

(Sunday’s Andrew Marrmite paper review where Polly’s partisan points are repeatedly punctured by Matthew Parris is moderately hilarious. It would have been funnier if she realised he was taking the proverbial.)

Ed Balls, Mr Frown’s representative on Earth and a very central part of the former Chancellor and Prime Monster’s extended campaign of attrition against anyone who looked at him funny, remains a hugely divisive figure and probably the Achilles heel of Mr Milipede’s operation. For all his undoubted political skills – as a prophet, he’s made so many claims about the economy that some of them were bound to come right – he’s played fast and loose at the Treasury (not to mention with his colleagues’ careers) too often for him to be trusted.

But this denialism about Labour’s responsibilities for what they did in government for thirteen years is all part of their plan to pin the blame on the Coalition and snatch back power in 2015. And we cannot let it stand.

The short form is “You can’t blame Labour for the Worldwide recession”, which sounds superficially reasonable, but it’s hiding some of the key facts.

It’s a bit like this:

“I went driving too fast in a snowstorm and crashed the car, but you can’t blame me for the snowstorm.”

Well, no, but you could see that it was snowing and you were driving too fast.

“But you can’t blame me for the snowstorm.”

It’s a strawman argument.

And it keeps being regurgitated like a form of self-hypnosis so that left-wing commentators, left-leaning voters and Hard Labour themselves can all permit themselves to forget that the biggest crash ever happened on their watch and excuse themselves of their culpability.

Here’s some of Polly’s take on it.

“Some primal political myths are now firmly lodged in the public mind.”

But that’s not going to stop them trying to use “big lie” techniques to try to dislodge them. Repeat this Labour-apologism often enough and maybe someone will start to believe it. What’s sinister is the way it starts out appealing to the conspiracy-theory freak tendency in the anti-establishment by accusing the accepted version of events of being “myth”.

“Labour's public spending didn't crash the economy.”

No, it was Labour’s failure to regulate the banks that crashed the economy, coupled with Labour actively encouraging a boom based on borrowing; Labour’s public spending just meant that we were in a far, far poorer position to recover afterwards. Also, who said “we’ve abolished boom and bust”?

“Labour was borrowing less than it inherited from the Tories.”

Well that’s just plain wrong because Polly’s forgotten to include the qualifier “in 2007 before the crash” from her crib card. Borrowing in 2008, ’09 and ’10 was astronomical.

But even if we give her a pass on the borrowing in 2007, what she’s saying is that at the height of the biggest boom in history when every Keynesian on the planet would tell you you should have been running a surplus, Labour were still borrowing. Yes, the Conservatives had badly lost control of the economy by 1997; that’s kind of why they lost, isn’t it. But since when did being a little less rubbish than John Major and Norman Lamont become the acme of economic prudence? It was actually by sticking to Ken Clarke’s plans in their first term – as they promised but no one, especially the Conservatories believed they’d do – that enabled Labour to pay down a reasonable sum off the national debt; but from 2001 onwards Gordon Brown did nothing but add to our borrowings.

“Osborne inherited a growing economy from Alistair Darling”

Darling borrowed 10% of GDP to generate 2% GDP growth. Any idiot could do that! But it’s not remotely sustainable is it, and of course the wheels came off again as soon as his artificial stimulus reversed. It was Darling, remember, who cancelled the capital investment program, Darling who promised “cuts deeper than Thatcher’s” and he was planning a post-election VAT rise to 20% to make the sums add up too. To the shame of both of them, Gideon being Chancellor made very little difference.

Those three points – “it was broken when we found it”, “we cut borrowing (if you squint at the figures)” and “Darling’s legacy of growth” – set on perpetual rinse and repeat are the clearest warning (if Damien McBride’s book was not enough) that Hard Labour have not rid themselves of the habit of spin.

Here's an interesting graph published today by the Guardian, based on evidence provided by the Office of National statistics.


It shows the steady decline in smoking over the past forty years.  Though there have been occasional blips (the most noticeable, in 1998, is apparently due to a change in the way the statistics were calculated) the direction of travel should be no surprise: from 45% of the population in the early seventies to around 20% today.

Smokers are smoking much less, too. I was also interested to discover that the threshold definition for a "heavy smoker" is twenty a day, and that only 5% of men and 3% of women come into that category.  The figures for 1974 aren't offered, so I'm not sure if the official definition of "heavy smoker" has changed, but 20 a day was most people's idea of average back in the 70s.  It wasn't unusual to come across chain smokers getting through as many as a hundred a day.

This is, of course, excellent news, unless you're in the life insurance business or are at all worried about the implications for pensions and social care of so many more people not dying of lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases.

You'll notice that the big decline took place in the seventies and eighties, long before the ban on tobacco advertising which was introduced in 2002, let alone the ban on smoking in public places (2006) or the introduction of graphic "warning" images on all packs in 2008.  It would be hard indeed to spot any effect from any of these measures from the graph alone.  It also suggests that the pearl-clutching reaction from the health lobby when the government recently shelved plans to introduce "plain packaging" for cigarettes (ie to replace branded designs with horror-movie stills showing the effect of smoking) was overdone.  The likelihood is that smoking rates will continue to tail off - although, as the end of the graph shows (the part that coincides with all the recent anti-smoking measures) the decline won't be nearly as steep as it was in the 70s or 80s, or even the early years of this century.  That's because the practice is now largely confined to a hard core of addicts and contrarians.

The graph neatly illustrates my longstanding principle that in public health policy the sledgehammer is only brought out once the nut has already been largely cracked.  It's only when the number of smokers was reduced to a small, and increasingly unpopular, minority that it became politically advantageous to clobber them.  Prior to that, the law was based on gentle persuasion (such as small-scale warnings on packets that merely informed purchasers that "smoking can seriously damage your health") along with the general background noise of official disapproval, public education and well-publicised "quit smoking" campaigns.

All this worked - or at least it coincided with a long and sustained fall in smoking.  The above graph, on the other hand, shows a very slight tick upwards at the end (representing the last couple of years) among male smokers at least.  Could it be that the increased intolerance of the law and the ever shriller and more apocalyptic language employed by anti-smoking campaigners is actually counterproductive?  It's at least plausible that the type of person still determinedly smoking after all these years of health scares (as opposed to those who have simply failed to give up) reacts badly to the authoritarianism of bans.

The pattern revealed by the graph does, however, show something significant about anti-smoking laws.  They aren't really aimed at discouraging smoking, or protecting the health of non-smokers, or even at punishing smokers (as some pro-smoking dissidents like to think).  Rather, they are a form of bandwagon-jumping.  Measures such as "plain packaging" are seized upon by politicians seeking to prove themselves "relevant" and up-to-date, in much the same way that they pounce upon passing moral panics or promote ideas that seem popular with focus groups.  The long-term decline in smoking is a social trend for which politicians would like to claim credit.  Introducing "tough" measures that can scarcely fail - because their aim has already been achieved - and which can claim to be both morally virtuous and medically justified is almost too tempting.

Have a good conference, did you?

I was unable to join you this year but watched much of the proceedings on TV. And to be frank, it was thoroughly tedious. Most of the speeches were read from scripts in a flat monotone. Rarely did any debate come to life. Rarely did anyone enthuse or persuade.

And it occurred that, if an old hack like me can find the conference boring, how much more boring must it seem to a lay audience? Indeed, all of the party conferences have become a tedium-fest, and if Britain’s political parties are trying to accelerate their slow death, they are going the right way about it.

It is unlikely that BBC Parliament’s viewing figures will be troubling the audience ratings during the conference season. The only event that will remain in the average viewer’s memory is UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom’s altercation with Michael Crick.

I have been going to party conferences regularly since the Liberal Assembly in Llandudno in 1976. There have been some important changes in the intervening 37 years.

First, the action has gradually shifted from debates in the main auditorium to the fringe. Like the Edinburgh Festival, the fringe has outgrown the formal proceedings, so that there is more of interest to be found in fringe meetings and the informal politicking in the cafés, bars and stalls area. Media coverage rarely reflects this development, even though modern lightweight camera equipment makes it easy to do (unlike in the 1970s when TV cameras were huge, immobile things fixed to rostrums in front of the stage).

Second, the art of oratory has died because modern politics no longer calls for this skill. Public meetings were once a regular feature of political campaigning but if you held one now hardly anyone would turn up. At the same time, the huge growth in the number of TV and radio stations means that knowing how to do a broadcast interview is a more important skill. For evidence of the death of oratory, consider Danny Alexander’s lifeless speech at this year’s conference or the way Sarah Teather’s attempts at jokes fell flat at previous ones.

Third, genuine debate has been increasingly edged out by the need to find room on the agenda for set piece speeches and presentations. At least there remains some debate at Liberal Democrat conferences (despite the pressure from the leader’s office). At Labour and Conservative conferences, there is no democratic debate or decision-making at all.

Fourth, the professions of public relations and political advising, which scarcely existed until the 1980s, have grown like Topsy. In the 1970s, each MP’s staff comprised one secretary. Nowadays, backbenchers typically employ four staff while government ministers also have an army of special advisers (‘SpAds’). Such advisers specialise in leaving nothing to chance. The result is a growth in the culture of spin and the soundbite, the dominance of cynical media management, and the death of spontaneity.

And fifth, no conference these days is complete without an accordionist:



What can be done about this? Apart from getting rid of the accordions, obviously.

There is no quick fix but one remedy is to strip out of the formal agenda as much as possible of the non-spontaneous elements. That means getting rid of all the set piece speeches and presentations, apart from the leader’s speech at the end of the conference (and also the occasional guest speeches by visiting foreign liberal leaders).

If any government ministers want to deliver speeches, let them take their chances in the rough and tumble of debate. Or speak at a fringe meeting. Or do a TV interview outside the hall. Anything but clog up the agenda with the sheer tedium of their over-rehearsed speeches.

The belligerent youths in the leader’s office wouldn’t like it, of course. Were the Federal Conference Committee to carry out such a purge, one of these SpAds would doubtless turn up at the next meeting of the committee to demand a retraction of this policy. In which case the committee should respond with a short message about sex and travel.

Oh, and one other thing. A trapdoor should be installed under the speakers’ rostrum, controlled by a big lever next to the session chair. Either that, or wire up the rostrum to the mains.

Postscript: This blog post has won Liberal England’s Phrase of the Day award.

Good heavens but love is a complicated thing.

I am writing about it. Annoyingly three out of the five things I am working on are love (or out of love) stories. I’m not supposed to write about love and romance. I am supposed to write about robot herons, nostalgia and philosophy.

What is reassuring is that there is absolutely nothing new in love. It’s the same old thing it was 1000 years ago. There was one love story of all the old love stories that stood out, it’s the centrepiece of what I am working on and informs the narrator’s voice for the entire play.

Essentially it’s boy meets girl, boy gets banished, girl stays behind and runs estate very well thank you very much and remains faithful to boy. Boy goes to England, finds younger, shinier, dare I say it, drippier, girl (quite frankly not a patch on competent life-partner back in Brittany), thinks ‘what the hell, I’m banished, wa-hey’. Decides to sort things out. Starts sailing back. Sailor mentions ‘Oh yeah, you know his wife back in Brittany?’ Drippy girl faints. Because she’s a fucking drip. Boy thinks girl is dead. Boy kills sailor. Boy puts girl in tomb. Boy reunited with competent life-partner. Competent life-partner is competent and thinks ‘Hello, boy made a tomb for a girl…waiddaminute’ Magical lady weasels* ** show Competent Girl the cure for fainted Drippy Girl. Drippy Girl wakes up. Competent Girl thinks ‘F*ck it, I’ll become an abbess so this pair of idiots can shack up. After all, it’s the Middle Ages, he’ll just kill me if he’d rather be with someone else’ Eventually Boy and both Girls (she clearly tired of idiot boy, too) are all part of the same abbey. Isn’t love grand and aren’t women marvellous?

I am trying to take the higher moral lesson of this tale (which may not come across in my retelling of it) that there is something in love and sisterhood that is far nobler and more aspirational that the boy + girl equation. Which there is. What I like is that the most important person in all this is the one that is good at getting things done. It’s not going to get you laid, but it will give you authority and a general pride in what you do. And to see all this in an 800 year old text written by a woman. Well…

I like this set of stories, I started out writing around them going ‘yes yes she was all beautiful, lalalala, sick with love tralalala’ but now I’m starting to see that this isn’t what they are at all. They are not Pink Novels with Shoes On About Places In West London…if anything the men in them are cupcake ciphers…they’re just fighty knights who seem to fall in love the minute they see a kirtle, mainly. These women are almost entirely proper people and worth far more than the frankly inadequate male gaze of adoration. I’m going to have to make some pretty wonderful women to tell the stories. Which I am now off to do.

*I did not make this up

**Not a euphemism

So, some of you are probably wondering how a novella like Equoid gets written.

Here's how:

A man walks into a bar.

Actually, two men walk into a hotel bar in downtown Denver, during the world science fiction convention. Charlie Stross is sitting in the bar, nursing a beer between events, and vaguely thinking about tracking down Peter Watts. But his attention is captured instantly as he notices something very odd about the two mens' body language.

One of them is John Scalzi. His body language is exuberant, extroverted, salesman-like. The other is noted editor Lou Anders. Lou's posture is defensive, arms crossed, cheek turned—almost as if he's biting back the words, get away from me, you creep!

Charlie has had a couple of beers and is feeling mischievous. So he gets up and approaches Lou and John. "Hi, guys," he says, "What's the argument about?"

"I'm trying to sell him a theme anthology!" Says Scalzi.

"But I'm not buying it," Says Anders.

"What's the theme?" Asks Stross.

"It's about unicorns!" Scalzi is bouncing up and down, almost vibrating with enthusiasm at this point.

"Unicorns?" Stross asks: "Surely there's got to be a new angle ...?"

"Yes! It's going to be a theme anthology of Unicorn Bukkake stories!"

Stross does a double-take as a light bulb—well, actually a stadium-sized floodlight—snaps on above his head and the hideous concept of unicorn bukake instantaneously cross-fertilizes with the sexually dimorphic marine predator he was wanting to ask Peter Watts about, and inseminates the Laundry Files universe.

"Lou, if you publish John's anthology I'll contribute a story: will that help? I've just had this idea ..."

Stross explains his idea about the life cycle of unicorns to Scalzi and Anders. When he stops retching, Scalzi's body language changes until it eerily matches Anders.

"Don't call us, we'll call you," he says with icy-sober politeness, and beats a hasty retreat.

---

That was in 2008.

Once the idea of unicorns as a sexually dimorphic species like unto ceratioid angler fish dug its way into my mind, I then began thinking about other aspects of the bizarre parasitic life-cycle of the unicorn. Mimicry is part of it. Co-opting a host to provide shelter and food is another. Having a distinct motile juvenile phase and a sessile spawning phase gave me a great explanation for some of the more disturbing aspects of unicorn reproduction. (Yes, I ran the Equoid life-cycle past Peter Watts for comment.)

Of course, the Equoid had other fortuitous side-effects for the Laundry universe: everything came together very neatly. The unfertilized juvenile female obviously provided an explanation for the pervasive mythology of the flesh-eating horse. And the adult, sessile, spawning horror lent itself to a particular interpretation of H. P. Lovecraft's nervous breakdown of 1908. Oh, and finally this allowed me to demonstrate the precise relationship between old HPL's mythos and the Laundry universe—namely that HPL is an enthusiastic but inaccurate guide, and about as much use to a practicing demonologist like Bob as a copy of the Anarchists Cookbook (the recipes in which are infamous for reducing the population of aspiring anarchist cooks).

All I needed then was a story. So I wrote about the first 4000 words in 2008, and let it settle for a year. Then wrote another 2000 words. Then had to put it away to make way for a novel. Or two. Or three. Finally, in early 2013, I had a gap—I'd just finished writing "The Rhesus Chart" and needed something to chew on. And it occurred to me that now was the best time to nail the sucker down, so I sat down in March and wrote the other 27,000 words of "Equoid" in about three weeks.

But anyway, I thought I'd give you this account of the origins of "Equoid", just so that Anders and Scalzi can take their fair share of the blame. Cheers, guys, and next time John pitches a theme anthology you'd better invite me!

Iron Man #223 (October 1987) by David Michelinie, Mark Bright, and Bob Layton

Early morning sees the Bonkers Hall Estate thronged with civil libertarians hunting for Clegg. Only a few hours later, they are joined by the students. I have to fire my twelve-bore when they threatened to walk on my cricket pitch, but otherwise I turn a blind eye to their depredations.

Out for a walk this afternoon, I find that they have cornered the very same Well-Behaved Orphan who took Clegg his supper yesterday. Naturally, I move in to rescue the little fellow, who has something of the young Christopher Robin about him.

“Now, my boy,” I ask him, “do you remember that the story I told you the other day? The one about
George Washington and the cherry tree and about how a chap should always tell the truth No Matter What? Oh and here’s a shilling: I think sixpence was a bit mean, what with inflation and the price of gobstoppers.”

He assures me he does, and as I walk away I hear him lisping: “I cannot tell a lie: he is in the boathouse.”

So, David Blunkett thinks we should censor the internet, because Nazis. No, that is his argument:

Drawing a parallel with Germany before the rise of the Nazis, he suggested a loose moral climate had fed the paranoia and fear that had allowed Adolf Hitler to flourish.

“In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Berlin came as near as dammit to Sodom and Gomorrah. There was a disintegration of what you might call any kind of social order.”

Except Berlin didn’t come close to Sodom and Gomorrah, or a breakdown of the social order. The 1920s in Berlin are known as the Golden Twenties, because of the incredible cultural and economic flowering that occurred in the city during that time – major industrialisation was occurring, the city was one of the world’s cultural capitals (Berlin Alexanderplatz and Metropolis are both from this time), and Einstein was also working in the city at that time.

Of course, there were some people who resented this cultural progress within the city and denounced the ‘degenerate art‘ this period produced. They were, of course, the Nazis. Using myths of depravity and exaggerating the supposed threat caused by what they saw as a breakdown of the social order, they were able to come to power – by creating the myths that David Blunkett now happily parrots in his attempt to keep pandering to the Daily Mail tendency. Effectively, Blunkett is trying to use Nazi propaganda uncritically to threaten the rise of Nazis in an attempt to get his way – it’s like watching Godwin’s Law eat itself.

Yes, Star Trek did in fact come back for a third season. Barely.

Critically however, this wasn't a renewal in the traditional sense either. What happened in March of 1968 was something the likes of which had really never been seen before in US television, and about which there is a considerable amount of myth and contradictory lore, most of which seems to have been deliberate. Central to these events is a woman name Betty JoAnne Trimble, better known as Bjo. So, in the first entry of the “Ship's Log, Supplemental” series, which looks at miscellaneous aspects of the Star Trek pop culture phenomenon, in particular the history and historiography of its fandom, I'm going to try and piece together as best I can the extent of her influence and connection to the franchise and the series of events leading up to Star Trek's unexpected renewal...And inevitable, if postponed, cancellation.

Although Star Trek never commanded acceptable, let alone impressive, ratings in its original run, what fans it did have were notoriously passionate and vocal. Throughout the duration of the first season, NBC got close to 29,000 letters from fans gushing about the show, which was the most amount of mail they got for any of their shows save The Monkees. Although a comprehensive cross-section of Star Trek fandom in the 1960s is difficult to establish, it is clear a great many of these early fans were women. Numerous producers, executives and other creative figures associated with the franchise for decades have pointed this out, despite their tendency to make spectacularly unfounded inferences from this fact, mostly in regards to how all those women were apparently just lusting after Spock (Ron Moore is particularly egregious in this regard, having made a somewhat thoughtless comment in the context of one of his early Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts but we'll get to that). Although there were most certainly more then a few women who fixated on Spock and who turned him into a sex symbol for one reason or another, the sexism implicit in assuming the *only* reason women watched Star Trek was because of this should be self-evident. In truth there is a long tradition of a feminist Star Trek fandom which goes all-but-ignored thanks to the unbelievably patriarchal nature of science fiction culture, and which will start to become more of a theme once we reach the 1970s. This outpouring of fan mail is the first manifestation of it.

It's not terribly difficult to see why women would feel inspired and empowered by Star Trek in 1968. Gene Roddenberry may have had a tendency to act like a misogynistic bastard, but in the two years since the series has been on the air people who aren't him have used the show to make considerable strides for more egalitarian representation: We've had characters like Ann Mulhall and Charlene Masters being depicted as colleagues in equal standing with their male shipmates, not to mention Uhura, who's become a strong and capable character in her own right over the course of the last season. Even characters like Daras in “Patterns of Force” got to be surprisingly nuanced for the time with detailed backstories and complex, multifaceted personalities. Of course, for every Ann Mulhall or Daras there's been a Nona or Sylvia, but the fans were right to hold up the good examples in lieu of the bad ones, especially if they were trying to argue for the show's merit. There was also the matter of William Shatner's and Leonard Nimoy's acting, which most certainly drew the attention of more then a few woman fans, but that's beyond the scope of this particular post.

It would make sense then that the monumental letter-writing campaign spanning the last half of 1967 and the first half of 1968 to save Star Trek from cancellation would be spearheaded by female superfan Bjo Trimble and her husband John. Trimble initially reached out to a 4,000 member mailing list for a science fiction convention to write NBC as a show of support for the struggling series, and to ask ten additional people to do so in turn. The campaign quickly snowballed to frankly ludicrous proportions, with NBC receiving a staggering 116,000 letters between that December and the following March, 52,000 of which arrived in the month of February alone (one executive, Norman Lunenfield, vividly describes looking out his window at NBC's Burbank office and seeing a fleet of mail trucks stretching to the end of the road). Rumours even circulate this wasn't even the real number, with the network actually receiving over a million responses but never making the rest public. Eventually, what had come to become known as the “Save Star Trek!” movement grew to include mass demonstrations on college campuses such as Caltech, Berkeley and MIT. Eventually, NBC had to relent and, as the traditional account goes, made the unheard-of decision to announce Star Trek had been renewed for a third season on air just after the initial broadcast of “The Omega Glory”. However, this doesn't tell the full story of what exactly happened in March, 1968 and the events that led up to it.

First of all, Bjo Trimble was no ordinary Star Trek fan, and I don't mean in just the fact she organised one of the most massive and famous letter-writing campaigns in history. In what's perhaps evidence of precisely how insular and niche Star Trek always was, Bjo Trimble was absolutely an insider in the science fiction community of the late 1960s. She got her start attending the Tenth World Science Fiction Convention held in Chicago in 1952, where she was stationed as a WAVE (part of an all-female Navy volunteer emergency response system instituted during World War II). There she met both Robert Bloch and Harlan Ellison, the latter of whom had just sold his first story and decided to propose as soon as he met her (she obviously turned him down, and eventually went on to meet her actual future husband John at the same convention). She became a regular at the conventions in subsequent years, organising some of the first science fiction themed art and fashion shows. It was at one of these shows that she met Gene Roddenberry after being captivated by a screening of “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, and even convinced him to show off the Star Trek uniforms at one of her exhibitions, thus providing one of the first glimpses fans would get of the new show's costume design.

Most interestingly, according to Herb Solow and Bob Justman in Inside Star Trek, it was Roddenberry who gave Trimble the idea to launch the 1967-8 letter-writing campaign due to their prior familiarity and who secretly provided the effort's necessary funding. Now, I have to quickly add this isn't meant to diminish what Trimble did in the slightest: Even if “Save Star Trek!” wasn't all her, she still pulled off one of the most remarkable and foundational feats in the history of genre fandom. Equally though, Trimble was not merely an average, if uniquely passionate and driven, Star Trek fan who took it upon herself to do something to help save her favourite show on principle, which is how certain pieces of official literature have had a tendency to depict her. And if Roddenberry was indeed at least partially behind “Save Star Trek!”, it's hard to fault him for it: Roddenberry was first and foremost a businessman who had an eye on what sold, and he did what any savvy businessman would have done. With it becoming abundantly clear Assignment: Earth was dead on arrival, Roddenberry may have decided to take action to save his other line in the water. And, seeing how big of a following Star Trek was getting, he merely took advantage of it. This would be neither the first nor the last time Roddenberry mobilized Star Trek fandom for leverage.

No, what's more telling is the reasoning NBC cited for bringing Star Trek back, and what the actual details and meaning behind the announcement really were. This is best summarised by a pair of quotes from contemporary newspaper stories about the letter-writing campaign. Vernon Scott from the Oxnard, California Press-Courier said

“The show, according to the 6,000 letters it draws a week (more than any other in television), is watched by scientists, museum curators, psychiatrists, doctors, university professors and other highbrows. The Smithsonian Institution asked for a print of the show for its archives, the only show so honored.”

while Cynthia Lowry of the Pasco, Texas Tri-City Herald wrote

“Much of the mail came from doctors, scientists, teachers, and other professional people, and was for the most part literate–and written on good stationery. And if there is anything a network wants almost as much as a high Nielsen ratings it is the prestige of a show that appeals to the upper middle class and high brow audiences.”

Both of these statements expressed sentiments that were echoed in NBC's actual publicity material, and I find that incredibly revealing. Although Bjo Trimble may not have been the complete embodiment of Star Trek's everyday female (and feminist) fanbase because of her insider connections, she absolutely spoke for them. She was a person they could relate to, and her campaign gave them a way to express their voice. And while yes, Star Trek has always held an appeal for the technoscience sectors, this isn't the exclusive domain of the franchise's appeal, despite the impression you might get from contemporary fandom. In this regard, it is imperative to note that NBC made a conscious, deliberate attempt to publicly court one type of fan over the other, and this is decision that will hold repercussions for the entire rest of the history of Star Trek fandom. From here on out, it's the upper-middle class, “highbrow”, “educated” (and tacitly white cis male of 18-25 years of age) and technologistic demographic who will be seen as Star Trek's “Real” fans, and not the women who actually made it a cult phenomenon to begin with (look even at the schools who were doing the protesting: All universities known for their technoscience and industry connections).

There's also one more thing. NBC may have gone out of their way to court this demographic, but they also immediately recognised it for what it was: Small. Star Trek's fans may have been loud and prolific, but the ratings weren't backing up the amount of fan mail they were getting, and a network can't justify keeping a show like Star Trek on the air by virtue of fan mail alone. So NBC made, ironically enough, an incredibly logical decision. Star Trek would be renewed for third season yes, but there would be an unspoken implication the third season would also be its last. Oh yes, it couldn't be more clear to me that NBC always intended to pull the plug on Star Trek in 1969. NBC made a big deal about moving the show to Mondays to court its newfound audience, but then backtracked and moved it to Fridays instead to avoid competition with Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and, allegedly, to appeal to Star Trek's younger fans. This led Roddenberry to complain "If the network wants to kill us, it couldn't make a better move" and to promptly walk off the show during the summer hiatus. Gene Coon, D.C. Fontana and John Meredyth Lucas soon followed suit.

There's a lot of secret messages telegraphed in that series of choices. First of all, NBC was *never* going to privilege Star Trek over the wildly successful Laugh-In, which was culturally significant in its own right. Secondly, while a Friday timeslot may well have been good for children, the flip side of that is because the reason for that is children are the only people who are home watching television on Friday nights. It's called the Friday Night Death Slot for a reason, and this had the added bonus of giving a pretty damn good clue as to who NBC really thought Star Trek's audience was comprised of. Dropping the budget by $3000 should probably have been another sign the writing was really on the wall. This led Nichelle Nichols to famously fume

“While NBC paid lip service to expanding Star Trek's audience, it [now] slashed our production budget until it was actually ten percent lower than it had been in our first season ... This is why in the third season you saw fewer outdoor location shots, for example. Top writers, top guest stars, top anything you needed was harder to come by. Thus, Star Trek's demise became a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I can assure you, that is exactly as it was meant to be.”

Nichols is absolutely right, of course. And while this decision may be seen as a criminal act of betrayal by the fans (and even TV Guide, who are gigantic Star Trek fans anyway, called it the fourth “Biggest TV Blunder Ever” in a special), it makes absolute perfect sense from the perspective of the network. And anyway, as difficult as it may be to believe, NBC's move to kill off the Original Series may have been the final event that guaranteed Star Trek's immortality. See, had the show been canceled in its second season, there wouldn't have been enough episodes to sell a syndication package. Giving Star Trek a third season tipped the total episode count over the minimum. NBC knew they had a show that was floundering in primetime, but they also knew that if they could sell it as part of a syndication deal the loyal fans would follow it and turn it into a regular and reliable source of income. And that's exactly what happened, and furthermore, Star Trek proved to be even more popular in syndication than it was in its original run. So popular, in fact, Paramount approached Gene Roddenberry and the team a decade later with the idea to maybe bring the franchise back to television. This is the very definition of what a Cult Sci-Fi show is, and this is how Star Trek became the archetypical example of the genre.

And that's the story of how a ropey show that had pretty much everything working against it turned into one of the most lasting pillars of Western popular consciousness. And, although NBC had a part to play, it was really the female fans who came together to let the network know they had something that was special (in spite of itself) and that shouldn't be discarded. The real criminal act of betrayal was not that NBC eventually did pull the plug on the Original Series: Rather, that was what allowed Star Trek to undergo its own true Metamorphosis. No, the real act of betrayal was that these women were never given the respect and credit they deserve for providing the imaginative spark that allowed Star Trek to become Star Trek.

Because they’ve discovered that trolls and jackasses in comment threads actively work against people taking science seriously.

Per this earlier discussion of comments, I think Popular Science is probably doing the right thing. The site doesn’t benefit from hosting dis-and-misinformers, and such folks are becoming more persistent and possibly more organized. Best to punt them entirely. They have their own places to stew; let them stew there. In the meantime the information in the articles will speak for itself.

PERMUTATION CITY and AXIOMATIC have now joined seven of my other titles available to US readers as $2.99 ebooks

To the Bonkers’ Arms, which is simply chock-a-block: as soon one barrel of Smithson & Greaves Northern Bitter is breached it is time to tap another one. I get talking to some the throng and discover that they are all civil libertarians – sound chaps to a man and, indeed, woman. Some are outraged by Clegg’s support for secret courts, while others take a dim view of his support for the smashing of the Manchester Guardian’s computers. (A woman called Miranda also comes into it somewhere, but I am afraid I did not grasp that bit. Still, I am sure she is A Very Good Sort.)

Conversation soon turns to where Clegg may be found. I, of course, decline to breathe a word and suggest they ask Meadowcroft. I later note him tapping his nose and leering while accepting a pint from a particularly civil civil libertarian.

“Good morning, and welcome once again to BookTalk. Today our guest is the always-controversial arts biographer, Mr. Tyrell Hokus. Mr. Hokus, good day to you.”

“Good morning, Ross.”

“Tom.”

“Ross.”

“I can assure you.”

“Well, hell. Sorry about that. I could have sworn it was Ross.”

“Think nothing of it. You’re getting closer every time. Well, Mr. Hokus, I assume that if you’re on my show, you have another of your daring, audacious and minimally researched biographies to hawk. What could possibly follow in the footsteps of such dubious masterpieces as Maurice Ravel: Disgusting Frog of a Queer, Graham Greene: Who Does That Swishy Pom Think He’s Fooling Anyway?, and your latest work, The Brontës: Shag-Twiddlers, Every Last One of Them?”

“Not a bit of it, Tom. I’m actually out of the biography business. It’s a mug’s game.”

“Really.”

“Sure. I want to be on Good Morning America and Late Night. I don’t know why I keep turning up on this show.”

“That makes several thousand of us.”

“Which is exactly my point. I just bought a new condo and I’m not going to be able to afford a double redwood hot tub on the coin I pull from the pitiful highbrow rubbish I sell to you lot.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t imagine any of our viewers have actually bought your books.”

“You’re telling me, sister.  Anyway, I’m going where the money is. My new book is fiction.”

“Not much of a change for you, really.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, most of your previous works in the field of arts biography, with the possible exception of the subject’s name, were complete fabrications.”

“Not a bit of it!”

“In Robert Frost: A Dog-Wanker Remembered, you claimed that Frost was an unconvicted sex murderer and the founder of the American Nazi Party.”

“For all I or anyone else knows, he was.”

“You also claim that he was Belgian.”

“He was! Originally.”

“And a sculptor.”

“What’s your point?”

“Tell us about your novel. Please.”

“About bloody time. It’s called The Celestine Prophecies.”

“Hasn’t that name already been used?”

“You can’t copyright a title, so says my agent.”

“And what is it about?”

“Well, you know that other book what’s called The Celestine Prophecies?”

“Vaguely.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“What, you just copied it?”

“Right. And it’s bound to do well. The first time round it sold like johnny cakes.”

“Word for word?”

“Naw, I changed the names of some of the characters, to make it fresh. I figure no one’ll remember the last one. It was ages ago.”

“Mr. Hokus, you can’t simply take someone else’s copyrighted work, put your name on it and claim it as your own. That’s against the law.”

“Stuff and nonsense, Tom. People do it all the time in the publishing game. It’s called ‘ghostwriting’.”

“But…traditionally, one pays one’s ghostwriter. Also, the ghostwriter produces original work. And the ghostwriter is usually aware that his work is being published under someone else’s name.”

“I’m sure if that were all true, my publisher would have let me know.”

“All your books are self-published, Mr. Hokus.”

“Well, I figured someone would ring me up regardless.”

“Mr. Tyrell Hokus, ladies and gentlemen, has been our guest on BookTalk.”

“Can I tell about my next project, Someone Other Than Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six?”

“Perhaps next time.”

Back in June, when the contents of Edward Snowden's cache of NSA documents were just starting to be revealed and we learned about the NSA collecting phone metadata of every American, many people -- including President Obama -- discounted the seriousness of the NSA's actions by saying that it's just metadata.

Lots and lots of people effectively demolished that trivialization, but the arguments are generally subtle and hard to convey quickly and simply. I have a more compact argument: metadata equals surveillance.

Imagine you hired a detective to eavesdrop on someone. He might plant a bug in their office. He might tap their phone. He might open their mail. The result would be the details of that person's communications. That's the "data."

Now imagine you hired that same detective to surveil that person. The result would be details of what he did: where he went, who he talked to, what he looked at, what he purchased -- how he spent his day. That's all metadata.

When the government collects metadata on people, the government puts them under surveillance. When the government collects metadata on the entire country, they put everyone under surveillance. When Google does it, they do the same thing. Metadata equals surveillance; it's that simple.

“Assignment: Earth” aired on March 29, 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4. Synchromysticism is the study of “happenings” and reoccurring patterns and synchronicity in human behaviour and world events, and the end of April is regarded in synchromystic circles as a “red zone” with a high concentration of violent activity. Sixty-nine days after King's death, Robert F. Kennedy was also assassinated. June 5, the date of Kennedy's death, also has synchromystic connections, being the date of the Six-Day War between Israel and its neighbouring countries. June is a major month on the whole with Midsummer (around the 24th) being a particularly important date. The flying saucer era began on June 24, 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing unidentified flying objects flying in formation at supersonic speed over Mount Rainier in Washington. The date has also marked several occasions when mysterious objects fell from the sky.

Looking back on the pilot of any long-running television series can be a strange experience. The reoccurring motifs we're accustomed to aren't there, or are at least present in forms different to the ones we're accustomed to. A pilot is by definition a first draft, and the one for Assignment: Earth is no different in this regard. What's especially strange about this pilot though (simply and uninspiringly titled “Assignment: Earth”, though I suppose it gets the point across), at least for someone used to what the show eventually becomes, is that it opens up not with Supervisor 194 Gary Seven in his swanky apartment, but with an oddly-shaped spaceship in orbit around Earth. The ship's captain, played by Canadian Royal Shakespearean actor William Shatner, exposits that he and his crew come from the far future and have travelled back in time to 1968 for historical research. Gary then transports aboard the ship, looks around in confusion and we cut to the intro credits...of an entirely different show.

Knowing a little background about how United States TV worked in the late-1960s would probably be beneficial. Back then it was customary for new pilots to be not-so-subtly disguised as regular episodes in currently-airing shows, so that the new show could piggyback off of the existing one, hopefully inheriting its audience. This still happens on occasion today, but not with the same kind of regularity as it used to. In this case, Assignment: Earth actually began life as a spin-off of an earlier, lesser-known series of Gene Roddenberry's called Star Trek, which followed the adventures of Captain Kirk (Shatner's character) and the crew of the USS Enterprise, which patrolled and explored the galaxy in the far future as part of an interstellar conglomerate called the United Federation of Planets. Star Trek was indebted to the Pulp and Golden Age science fiction genres of the 1950s and early 1960s, in much the same way as Assignment: Earth was to the “spy-fi” fad of the late-1960s and 1970s, at least at first.

Part of the reason Star Trek isn't as well remembered as its successor is today is that it never scored particularly good ratings, partially due to the fact that it largely wasn't any good, and it ultimately burnt itself out after two seasons. But let's bear in mind we all know Assignment: Earth was no great shakes in its earliest days either, and there's every reason to believe Star Trek might have been just as successful had it been given the chance. Certainly from what we can see in this episode alone it looks like it had promise-Shatner is likeable, and Leonard Nimoy and James Doohan deliver equally memorable turns as science officer Spock and chief engineer Scott, respectively. Nevertheless, this would explain why it ran a backdoor pilot as its series finale.

In this regard we need to talk about the episode itself a bit. Aside from the framing device of having the Enterprise crew from Star Trek intervene and slow the plot up a bit, the story here is largely the same as the one we're familiar with from the premier episode a year later: Gary is sent to Earth to tamper with the launch of a nuclear warhead and scare the major powers into abandoning the Cold War arms race and the concept of balance of power. The biggest difference is Roberta: While she's still Gary's fabulously Carnaby Street liaison and assistant, here she's the former secretary of the deceased agents, and depicted as a flighty, easily perplexed scatterbrain. While erratic loopiness is something of a character trait of Roberta's at this point in the show's history, it does help to approach Assignment: Earth from the perspective of the future, where we know she'll eventually transform into a stronger, more interesting character. Here though her confusion causes more than a fair share of major problems for the rest of the characters, and this combined with the dominating, controlling “You're not allowed to leave, you've seen too much” attitude Gary has toward her for the majority of the episode makes her scenes borderline unwatchable.

The one saving grace about Roberta in the pilot is that she's played with impeccable earnestness by Teri Garr, who at least sells every bit of her ditziness and endeavours to make her charming. Garr would go on to have marquee roles in movies like Tootsie and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and shadows of her future performances are visible here. She would have made an excellent Roberta, and it's a shame she didn't return for the series. Not that Garr can really be blamed, though: She was treated absolutely horribly on the set by Roddenberry, who kept ordering the hemline on her skirt raised over and over again to the point it actually ruined the look of the costume. Yet another reminder of how much of a problem Roddenberry's influence was early on in Assignment: Earth, and how much of a godsend for the series' future prospects it was that he was eventually replaced as showrunner. While not as huge of an issue as Roberta, Gary has problems of his own that touch on probably the fundamental issue this series is going to have to address: As a perfect human from space who comes down to Earth to teach us all how to think and behave, there's an undeniably patriarchal streak to Gary, especially as Roberta, the show's representative of youth culture, is depicted here as someone who has good intentions but is very hapless, needing the guiding hand of the much older man to help her along. This is...distasteful, to put it mildly.

On March 29, 1968, A.D., a Federation Temporal Agent code-named Gary Seven clandestinely transported down to that period's Earth, setting up a base for undercover operations in the region known at the time as New York City. His first mission was to secretly sabotage the launch of a rocket-mounted orbital nuclear weapons platform, the last-minute destruction of which would frighten the major world powers into abandoning the Cold War arms race they were engaged in. This is an example of a situation where direct intervention in the local time-stream was in fact not only called for, but required. Had the United States and the Soviet Union continued their policy of mutually assured destruction, this would have risked preventing our timeline from coming to pass. In certain such cases, an effect comes into play known as the predestination paradox: In short, this means that the events transpiring must, in fact, transpire in order to uphold the sanctity and integrity of the timeline. The events of March 29 and Gary Seven's actions are one such example of this phenomenon. Modern timeships are equipped with specialized temporal scanners that allow their crews to easily determine if they are working with such a situation.

There are many myths and urban legends surrounding this particular temporal event. The most prominent of these is the rumour that a third party was at play, or perhaps even another Federation timeship (in some versions of this myth, the timeship is none other than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 under the command of James T. Kirk. The practical absurdity of such a claim, given both Kirk and the Enterprise date from a point in history centuries before the Federation had mastered temporal mechanics, should be self-evident). The truth is that there was no such intervention, from Kirk or anyone else: Gary Seven caused the rocket to malfunction, just as he was meant to. The Enterprise was in fact involved in this event as per popular speculation, being in the same time-space on an unrelated mission of historical research. Seven's motives were naturally unclear to Kirk and his crew, and it was a critical lapse of judgment on Seven's part to not share such crucial information with them, and his actions put his mission in grave jeopardy, could very well have destabilized the timeline, or worse, resulted in a Temporal Civil War.

Our “successors” don't want us to know that not everyone living tacitly under Federation jurisdiction shares its cultural assumptions, nor keeps in lock-step with its talking points or received history. There is a long tradition of Starfleet timeships that have gone rogue. Jim Kirk knew that his future was in danger. That's why he interfered with Gary Seven's plans. The textbooks may *say* that this was some “predestination paradox” or that “everything happened the way it was supposed to”, but then they would, wouldn't they? History is written by the people who have the power and the agency to write it.

“Assignment: Earth” isn't a Star Trek episode. It's a backdoor pilot for a TV series Gene Roddenberry hoped to launch for the fall 1968 season. The original script, dating to late 1966, was a standalone story Roddenberry retooled to include a Star Trek framing device so he could sell his new show as a spin-off. As a result, the Enterprise crew is barely in this episode, and when they do get involved they mostly screw up the *real* heroes' plans and get themselves uselessly captured due to their incompetence. The basic cynicism of the brief aside, this is quite telling: To be blunt, you don't do an episode like this if you expect the parent show to live a long and healthy life. No, when this was being filmed all signs still pointed to Star Trek being canceled at the end of its second season, and Roddenberry did what any Hollywood businessman would have done: Gear up to put the old show to rest and get the new show sold as quickly as possible.

And the episode as aired does reflect this: If “Bread and Circuses” last week was the end of the Star Trek story, “Assignment: Earth” is the bonus episode we get that lets us know what's coming next. More than anything else in the Original Series, this belies the truth about Gene Roddenberry's attitude towards Star Trek: It was never some grand, utopian vision for the future that was deeply personal and meaningful to him. No, Star Trek was a show an LA scriptwriter pitched to a network, and when it looked like it was about to run its course he tried to pitch another, because that's what you do when you have that sort of job. What's most revealing honestly is the fact Roddenberry was planning Assignment: Earth as early as 1966: That should say everything about how much confidence anyone had in Star Trek ever seeing any manner of success.

What's equally as telling is that Assignment: Earth was an even bigger disaster than Star Trek, and it's entirely due to Gene Roddenberry's overbearing incompetence. First of all, Roddenberry was selling a pilot for a potential show that wasn't going to have any of its cast carry over (again). Robert Lansing, who plays Gary Seven, made it very clear he was unwilling to commit to a television series, and Teri Garr, who played Roberta Lincoln, was so horribly treated by Roddenberry she walked off the set and refuses to speak about him or Star Trek to this day (apparently he kept raising the hemline of her skirt to make it more revealing, which even managed to piss off William Ware Theiss). Even if Lansing and Garr hadn't been driven away though, there are a number of fundamental problems with this concept that would have made Assignment: Earth extremely problematic. Gary Seven himself is concerning on a number of levels: What's important to note about him at first is that he seems loosely based on accounts of “contactees”. This phenomenon dates (at least in the modern UFO era) to at least the 1940s, and involves people who claim to have had contact with benevolent extraterrestrial beings. These beings are reportedly concerned about the future of Earth and humanity, and offer to help us solve our problems by, among other things, ending nuclear testing, ending warfare outright or using their contacts on Earth to spread their message of peace and solidarity.

This would at least make Assignment: Earth come across as comparatively current (although it'll be another decade or so before anything of Roddenberry's comes close to seriously engaging with UFOlogy and Forteana), although an even better point of comparison might be the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, where a highly advanced alien comes down to Earth to try and get humanity to end all warfare and conflict, by force if he has to. Curiously, both the contactee phenomenon and the basic themes of “Assignment: Earth” and The Day the Earth Stood Still seem more in tune with the 1970s Glam-style concept of the Starman who beams down to enlighten us all, at least superficially. What's different about Gary Seven is his modus operandi and general tactics are also drawn from spy-fi, a fusion of science fiction and spy fiction-Seven has to conduct all his operations undercover.

The main problem is that this is still pretty patriarchal: Once again, we have an enlightened male authority figure teaching us the proper way to behave and do things, and this is especially egregious in “Assignment: Earth” as Gary Seven is paired off with Roberta Lincoln, a character who straightforwardly proves Gene Roddenberry knew as much about youth culture as he did women, that is to say, absolutely nothing. Roberta could have been a cool character, a Mod action superheroine who shows us the idealized future Gary Seven wants can only come about by embracing women and the youth. Instead, Garr gets to stand around slack-jawed as magic future aliens beam in and out of her office, lock her up, physically restrain her and just generally dismiss her as she's clearly too stupid to understand what's going on or to help out in any meaningful way. Garr does make Roberta charming and likeable (actually, “Assignment: Earth” is on the whole more then decently entertaining to watch, even if it's nowhere near as good as I remember it being), but, predictably, she's hideously wasted on the part.

When paired with Gary Seven, this becomes abundantly obvious: Roddenberry clearly only thinks the youth have their hearts in the right place and are too naive, flighty and scattered to actually bring about any real change. What they need, according to him, is an older, wiser, male authority figure to show them how things really work. Also, Roberta is supposed to be twenty. Gary Seven looks middle-aged. This makes the pseudo-romantic relationship the show clearly is setting them up to have (crucially, Isis gets jealous, because the only two modes a woman can have are nagging and jealousy, even if they're shapeshifting cat aliens. Seriously, Roddenberry can even screw up shapeshifting cat aliens) beyond creepy. Compare this to Raumpatrouille Orion, where the headquarters of the Rapid Space Fleet is in the Starlight Casino, a Mod bar, and everyone has Mod-inspired hairstyles and uniforms. There, the Mods were depicted as literally being from the future, even if we'll ultimately need to move beyond them someday to get at real, material social progress (which was, in 1966, not only a fair comment but a damn prescient one). Meanwhile here, in 1968, almost 15 years into the Mod movement, and Gene Roddenberry can't help but write his Mod lady as an excruciating stereotype.

But really, there's only one way I could close out the second season of Star Trek, and the show's original intended run. While we are, in fact, coming back next year thanks to one of the most unprecedented acts in United States pop culture history, the story of Star Trek and its original creative team is over now. It's fitting then the “finale” last week was co-written by Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon, as this is their last real opportunity to make a firm declaration about what Star Trek is about. If “Assignment: Earth” was largely Roddenberry, “Bread and Circuses” was largely Coon (well...up to the end). Coon was also the person really responsible for the unbelievable Hail-Mary pass that was the run from “The Immunity Syndrome” to “The Ultimate Computer”, the first real time we had an unfiltered look at the beating heart of Star Trek. The heart that Gene Coon gave it. While we'll be seeing them both more next year, along with D.C. Fontana and John Meredyth Lucas (and Roddenberry of course sticks around until 1991) it's not quite the same after this.

So let's briefly take a moment to think back on the achievements of Gene Coon, D.C. Fontana, Dave Gerrold and John Meredyth Lucas. These are the people who took a ropey, ill-conceived retrograde bit of sci-fi and, within the space of a year and a half, made it into a legend. We know they did even now, in 1968: No sooner does this episode go out than the unthinkable happens, and the people make it clear just how much the show Star Trek became meant to them.

“Assignment: Earth” involves Gary Seven attempting to sabotage a nuclear warhead loaded into a Saturn V rocket. On April 4, 1968, NASA did indeed launch a Saturn V rocket, except it was carrying the Apollo 6 test craft. Just as depicted in the episode, the rocket did in fact suffer a malfunction and go off course. Star Trek fans are quick to claim this is evidence of the truthfulness of “Assignment: Earth” as Kirk and Spock say the details of the malfunction were never fully made public.

Isis generously decided to provide the nominal cat picture every website must have by law. I expect this to become my most popular post.

Andy Beckett has a good article in today's Guardian on the inexorable rise of the concept of the 'global race':

Rushed into use shortly after the 2012 Olympics, by a party whose key figures went to expensive schools that fetishise sport and general competitiveness, "the global race" is hardly the most subtle or socially sensitive of rhetorical devices. But it has the advantage of flexibility. Britain, the Tories tell us, needs to "win" it, "succeed" in it, and get "to the top" in it; "compete" in it, "thrive in" it, and be "strong" in it; "fight" in it; or merely, "equip" itself for it and "get fit for" it. If Britain fails to do some or all of these things, it will "sink", "lose", "fall behind", be left in "the slow lane", or let "others take over". 

This race, we are told, is economic. Our opponents are usually specified: the rising countries of Asia and South America such as China, India and Brazil. Yet the prize is vaguely and promiscuously defined: "jobs", "wealth", "growth", "trade", "talent", "technology", "skills", "capital", "competitiveness", "big ideas", "influence", "innovation", "investment", "investment opportunities", "recovery". 

Meanwhile the race is invoked to justify seemingly any government goal or policy: bigger British arms sales abroad and smaller school holidays; tighter immigration controls and looser planning laws; the lavish high-speed rail project HS2 and a leaner Whitehall; harder GCSEs and better childcare; reducing social security and reforming the European Union; promoting the renewable energy industry and the redevelopment of Battersea power station; even dignifying Cameron's recent visit to Kazakhstan.

Beckett quotes Philip Booth of the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs casting doubt on the concept:

"Economists don't think of trade as a race in any way," says Booth. "The world economy is not a zero-sum game. Countries get richer together. If China carries on reforming and growing, there will be more opportunities there for Britain." Reich agrees: "The race needn't [mean that] every country's citizens lose ground, but some lose more than others … or [that] some can gain only at the expense of others … We can all grow, and at the same time spread prosperity to more people."

The global race is not really a free-market concept at all - those who think it is should study the idea of comparative advantage. Its closest relative is the idea of national efficiency, which flourished before the First World War and, thanks to a similar looseness, could justify anything from socialised medicine to eugenics.

(For those of you reading in real-time: I recently was fortunate enough to exchange some emails with C. David Seuss, Spinnaker’s co-founder and president. He filled in some gaps for me, and also pointed me to a Harvard Business School case study that filled in some more. If you’re deeply interested in our current theme, you might want to look back over the previous two articles. There’s nothing new that is really earth-shattering, but I was able to fix a minor error or two and add a few more details on Spinnaker’s history and particularly the SAS development system used for most of the Telarium games.)

Ray Bradbury enjoys by far the best literary reputation amongst science-fiction writers of the Golden Age. Certainly he’s the only one you’re likely to find on a high-school English syllabus. If you’re feeling cynical, you can attribute much of his reputation to a chance meeting with Christopher Isherwood in a bookstore in 1950. When Bradbury showed considerable chutzpah in pushing a signed copy of his book The Martian Chronicles upon him, Isherwood for some reason actually read it and wrote a glowing reviewing heralding this “very great and unusual talent.” “I doubt if he could pilot a rocket ship, much less design one,” wrote Isherwood, thereby granting Bradbury his bona fides as a suitably scientifically inept literary writer, and making him the only science-fiction writer it was acceptable for the intelligentsia to read despite a bibliography that consisted mostly of the likes of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Weird Tales.

But of course attributing Bradbury’s reputation entirely to one English intellectual’s approbation would be unfair. He was — or eventually flowered into — just about the only one of his peers aware of a deeper, richer literary tradition than the one that began with the first issue of Amazing Stories in 1926, the only one who tried to craft beautiful — as opposed to merely functional — prose. He has some entertainingly pulpy adventure stories to his credit and some more labored but lyrical stories, as well as one novel of childhood, Dandelion Wine, that isn’t science fiction at all. Still, his bibliography of truly canonical works is fairly thin for an important writer who claimed to have written every single day for more than seventy years. For all his continuing literary reputation, most of his work after 1962′s Something Wicked This Way Comes was politely received and just as quickly forgotten amongst both genre and literary fans.

Bradbury’s most famous work, Fahrenheit 451, dates to 1953. It’s a book which kind of fascinates me but also frustrates the living hell out of me. If you somehow escaped it in English class, know that Fahrenheit 451 is the story of a fireman named Guy Montag who lives in a future where that profession doesn’t mean what you think it does: firemen now start fires rather than put them out. Specifically, their mission is to burn books, which never caused anyone anything but trouble anyway and have now been replaced by television and other more easy-going entertainments. This mission is considered so essential that houses are built from a special flame-proof material, not out of concern about conventional fire safety but because it makes it easier for the firemen to come and burn any stray books with a minimum of fuss. Because every dystopian novel needs a doomed rebel against the system, Montag grows disillusioned with his profession, and eventually joins the literary underground struggling to keep the flame of knowledge alive. His means of disillusionment is — in another fine dystopian tradition — a girl, a teenage neighbor named Clarisse. And this is where I first start to get really annoyed. Bradbury has been credited, with some truth, with foreshadowing or even inspiring everything from 24-hour news as entertainment to the Sony Walkman in Fahrenheit 451. I’ve never, however, seen him properly credited for his most insidious creation: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl was first labelled as such by Nathan Rabin in a review of the movie Elizabethtown for the Onion’s AV Club. She has no real existence of her own; we never learn her hopes or fears or anything of her inner life. Her whole purpose rather revolves around the brooding male she has apparently been sent from Manic Pixie Heaven to save through the sheer force of her quirky charm. “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” Rabin writes, “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” We can add “sensitive young science-fiction writers” to that sentence.

The rain was thinning away and the girl was walking in the center of the sidewalk with her head up and the few drops falling on her face. She smiled when she saw Montag.

“Hello!”

He said hello and then said, “What are you up to now?”

“I’m still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.”

“I don’t think I’d like that,” he said.

“You might if you tried.”

“I never have.”

She licked her lips. “Rain even tastes good.”

“What do you do, go around trying everything once?” he asked.

“Sometimes twice.” She looked at something in her hand.

“What’ve you got there?” he said.

“I guess it’s the last of the dandelions this year. I didn’t think I’d find one on the lawn this late. Have you ever heard of rubbing it under your chin? Look.” She touched her chin with the flower, laughing.

“Why?”

“If it rubs off, it means I’m in love. Has it?”

He could hardly do anything else but look.

“Well?” she said.

“You’re yellow under there.”

“Fine! Let’s try you now.”

“It won’t work for me.”

“Here.” Before he could move she had put the dandelion under his chin. He drew back and she laughed. “Hold still!”

She peered under his chin and frowned.

“Well?” he said.

“What a shame,” she said. “You’re not in love with anyone.”

I’m sure that for certain people — probably mostly romantic boys of about the age when Fahrenheit 451 is most often assigned in school — Clarisse reads as delightful. As for me, I find it hard to believe that a married 33-year-old man wrote this tripe that sounds like something I might have written for my high-school creative-writing class. Even making due allowance for different times, passages like this make it hard for me to see Bradbury as the serious writer Isherwood and others would have me believe him to be.

But if we don’t want to place Bradbury alongside Joyce and Orwell as one of the twentieth century’s greatest, what do we want to do with him? I tend to go down the same road as Bryan Curtis, who claimed that Bradbury was not so much a great writer full stop as a great pulp writer. Fahrenheit 451 is… well, it’s a silly book really. This is a world where Benjamin Franklin is honored as the supposed first book burner; where a bunch of maintenance workers who if they lived in our world would be changing the oil in your car come out to do a quick blood exchange on someone who’s taken a few too many pills; where teenage joy-riders run over pedestrians just for fun with no consequences; where semi-robotic, semi-organic Mechanical Hounds chase fugitives through the streets. All of this is described in luridly purple prose that wouldn’t be out of place in a Roger Corman script — or a computer-game instruction manual. A Mechanical Hound, resting after a hard day on the job: “It was like a great bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare, its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil out of itself.” You’re trying way too hard, Ray…

It’s all so over the top that it makes Fahrenheit 451 kind of fun to read, despite the fact that there’s not a hint of conscious humor in the book. Compared to the masterpiece of dystopian literature, Nineteen Eight-Four, it’s just not even operating on the same level. Orwell’s world is horrifying because it is believable; Bradbury’s is anything but. Every sentence Orwell writes is taut, considered; Bradbury just sort of gushes everywhere, piling on the adjectives until sentences threaten to buckle under their weight. The same goes for his other building blocks: he piles on a nuclear war from out of nowhere at the end of the book because, hey, why not add to the dystopian litany? I’m not sure I’m prepared to accept that Bradbury was a better writer than Clarke, Asimov, or Heinlein. I just think he was trying harder to be a good writer (in the sense that would lead to acceptance by Isherwood and his peers) than they were. Bradbury post-Isherwood dearly wanted to leave the pulps behind; he allegedly begged his publisher to remove the words “science fiction” from his books entirely. Yet the pulps remained at the core of who he was as a writer, at least when he was at his best. The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951) are my favorite books by him because their style is still easy, relatively unaffected by the call to Literature. Fahrenheit 451, unfortunately, often all but buries its pulpy fun elements underneath all that bloated verbiage.

Still, it’s possible to read Fahrenheit 451 as neither an endeavor in serious world-building nor pulpy adventure, but as an allegory about the threat posed to books and, well, thoughtfulness in general by mass media and the technology that enables it — as, in other words, Bradbury’s version of Animal Farm rather than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Certainly this is the most sympathetic way to approach it today if we’re determined to label it Great Literature, even as we remain in doubt whether that was really Bradbury’s intention.

Bradbury was always more than a bit of a Luddite. In later years he railed against the Internet and computers as only a reactionary old man can, displaying breathtaking ignorance in saying a computer was nothing but a glorified typewriter, and he already had two of them. Similarly, his target in the 1950s was television. Yes, there are ways in which Fahrenheit 451 feels shockingly prescient: the clamshell earphones people use to isolate themselves from the world even when out and about in public; the elaborate home-theater setups in every house; the ATM machines. And the questions Bradbury raises are profoundly worth asking still — in fact, more than ever — today, when everyone seems more and more wedded to their Facebook and Twitter accounts and less and less able to just enjoy the proverbial breeze on their cheeks, able to simply be in the non-electronic world of people and physical sensation. It’s also important to note that the dystopia of Fahrenheit 451, unlike that of Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a populist dystopia. The people have brought this world upon themselves, and fundamentally want things to be this way.

But of course for every point on this chain of thought there’s a counterpoint. If Twitter is a network of narcissistic celebrities and would-be celebrities tweeting about what they had for lunch, it’s also a way for activists in totalitarian countries to communicate outside the reach of the government. If email and the Internet isolate us from our neighbors, they have also opened up a new era of international communication and understanding, not just among the elites and heads of state but amongst ordinary kids in high schools and universities around the world. Perhaps the kindest thing I can say about Fahrenheit 451 in what I know has hardly been a glowing review is that it can lead us to think about these issues seriously. That Bradbury saw so much of the future in which we now live in 1953 is indeed remarkable. I just wish all of his arguments about it weren’t so muddled.

I’m a huge lover of books, so I ought to be very sympathetic toward Fahrenheit 451‘s defense of literature. Actually, however, I find it rather wrong-headed in that it misses everything that is personally important to me about literature. The rebellion that Montag finally joins at the end of the novel is made up of aging professors and other erudite types who have each memorized a classic work of literature, to be passed on to future generations of rebels and preserved until humanity decides it is ready for it again. Beyond representing a wonderfully interesting game of Chinese whispers, this scheme bothers me because it treats books as objects to be mothballed away, a static canon of Great Works held sacrosanct. It’s another sign of the conservative, even reactionary viewpoint from which Bradbury writes — a viewpoint I just don’t share and don’t ever want to. I’m for a living literature of creativity and reinvention; I’d rather watch a bunch of Italian prisoners put on an earthy performance of Julius Caesar that really matters to their own lives than watch a meticulously researched reproduction of the Elizabethan theater experience put on by a bunch of fussy scholars — to say nothing of those bores who pride themselves on pulling out an out-of-context Shakespeare quote for every occasion. Bradbury’s rebels should be spending at least as much time creating new books as preserving those that have gone before. The health of a culture is measured not by the size of its museums but by the creative life out there on its streets. And no, the irony of someone who calls himself the Digital Antiquarian writing this is not entirely lost on me. Suffice to say that museums and preservation are important too, but will never be as beautiful as a kid who picks up pen, paintbrush, instrument, or computer for the first time.

Bradbury continually confuses books as physical objects with the idea of books or, if you like, ideas. Frustratingly, at times he does seem to get the distinction:

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

In another place he rails against what a later generation would come to call political correctness:

Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.

Yet, as he himself noted in the more lucid passage that precedes this one, all of these ideas can be conveyed by other means than paper and print. Nor are all books by some inherent property of the form challenging or enlightening. The bestseller rolls and airport newsstands are filled with volumes that are neither. And what of challenging films, television, even, yes, computer games? How are these things controlled when the firemen are obsessed only with paper books, any and all of them? With all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, the medium is not always the message.

Fahrenheit 451 is a stew of conflated ideas about censorship, the decline of reading, technology, media, government, nuclear apocalypse, even automobiles. Heady, worthwhile topics all, but it’s hard to pull one thing apart from another, hard to extract a cogent point of view on anything. Perhaps the book’s secret weapon is that it’s hard to find anything solid enough in this amorphous mass to really kick against. Bradbury himself became an expert at weaving and dodging through criticisms of the book as times and interlocutors changed. One year he was writing an afterword that was all about censorship in current times; a few years later Fahrenheit 451 wasn’t about censorship at all. The only ideas we can fully get our hands around are thoroughly banal: books are good, burning them is bad; everything’s going to hell with the younger generation.

The latter has been key to the book’s popularity with disgruntled authority figures everywhere, just as the pulpy fun and melodrama makes it appealing to teenagers. If it’s not ultimately a great book, it’s certainly one with something to appeal to a lot of different people, which made it a pretty good target for adaptation into a commercial computer game. We’ll see how that fared next time.

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September 23rd, 2013: This Is How You Die is the sequel to Machine of Death and is also SUPER AWESOME. It's out now! Within that book is a choose-your-own-path story called Your Choice, by Richard Salter. We thought it'd be a cool way to share some of the book by putting up that story as an interactive website, complete with audiobook narration! Go click that link! You can read a story OR have it read to you! :o One year ago today: what if this comic gets taken down at noon and replaced with the words "GLUTEN IS PERFECTLY SAFE. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT."? what if that happens – Ryan

I am taking tea on the terrace when I notice an unruly mob struggling with the door the tradesmen’s entrance. I hurry over to give them a piece of my mind.

“We’re students,” they say, “and we’re looking for that Nick Clegg.” It soon transpires that they are jolly cross with him – tuition fees and so forth.

“Now look here,” I say. “In the first place, this is private property: in the second, you are all pulling at a door marked ‘Push’. Let me assure you, you won’t find Nick Clegg in the Hall.” I may, quite inadvertently, have winked at this point.

******

Talking of Clegg, I wouldn’t see the fellow starve. I have Cook rustle him up a cold supper and summon a Well-Behaved Orphan to take it to him in a wicker basket, with the promise of shiny new sixpence if he is quick about it.

Nick Clegg’s speech to the annual conference struck a firmly equidistant tone with

We’re not trying to get back into Government to fold into one of the other parties – we want to be there to anchor them to the liberal centre ground, right in the centre, bang in the middle. We’re not here to prop up the two party system: we’re here to bring it down.

backed up with a list of Conservative policies blocked, and a promise to block some Labour policies – once we know what they are – and implicitly to prevent Labour being reckless with the economy and public finances again.

To be clear this doesn’t imply that the Liberal Democrat party is bang in between the other two, it is more liberal than either. From opportunities for the least well off and fairer taxes, through crime, immigration, internationalism, to political reform and personal liberty, we have a liberal message which the other parties resist. But it is harder to drag any coalition government in a liberal direction than a centrist one, because the votes in parliament stack up reliably against us.

This speech is clearly looking forward to the potential of working with either of the other parties after the next election, and rebutting the charge that only another coalition with the Conservatives could work. The choice of who we work with, if anyone, will be made by the voters. This is equidistance, as we know it; right down to the policy that the top rate of income tax should be 45p.

But there is a problem on the horizon. How can a third party be equidistant unless the other parties sit still? In the run up to the Labour conference, we hear Ed Miliband promising to bring back socialism, and British apprenticeships in punishment for firms hiring foreign workers. (From a party whose government’s apprenticeship programme was a meagre fraction of the coalition’s.)

We shouldn’t leap to conclusions here – we are talking about an instinctive answer to a question from a member of the public.

In a question-and-answer session, Mr Miliband was asked when he would “bring back socialism”. He replied: “That’s what we are doing, Sir.”

This may just suggest, for now, a strategy of shoring up the core vote, or of spooking the markets in a last-ditch attempt to forestall good news on the economy. But the question remains, if, for example, Miliband plays to the hard left and Cameron were to court the centre, what would become of equidistance?

The answer is that it would be under some strain. We could not and should not change what we believe at the behest of the others. However by being a more distinctively liberal party, we can and will maintain a distance to them both, as they lurch left or right.

* Joe Otten is a councillor in Sheffield, and a prospective European Parliamentary candidate for Yorkshire and the Humber

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

Today’s Observer reports that Nick Clegg is to hold an investigation into whether members of his team briefed against Vince Cable before conference.

The matter in question is a briefing given that said that, in a debate on the Glasgow economy motion at an MPs’ awayday, the vote went 55-2 against Cable's unhappiness with it.

This was reported by the media, plainly as the result of an official briefing, though was later the subject of a limited retraction by the BBC’s Nick Robinson, who said:

I am now told that no vote was held after a debate about economic policy at the Lib Dem parliamentary meeting a few weeks ago. However, sources close to both Vince Cable and Nick Clegg agree that the Business Secretary did urge the party to be prepared to relax fiscal policy if the recovery wasn’t sustained. Mr Cable is said to have had the support of just one other Lib Dem MP. Mr Clegg persuaded all the others. So, it was 55 versus 2.

There are several reasons why it is clear that Robinson and his colleagues were misled in a way designed to damage Cable, an idiotic course of action by whoever was responsible since Cable is a major party asset and a public figure in his own right.

The most obvious is that, with David Ward suspended from the party whip over his comments on the Middle East, and Mike Hancock having had the whip removed over matters we need not enter into here, there could not have been 57 MPs present.

Even if there had been, anyone who spoke to a few MPs at conference would be perfectly well aware that a lot more than two prefer Cable’s position to Clegg’s.

Indeed, one MP said the meeting in question had no formal vote but he kept a scorecard of speakers’ sentiments that came out 2:1 in Clegg’s favour – a much more believable ratio and, as one MP put it, “many of those on Clegg’s side were those who still retain ambitions”.

The Observer did not say who was to conduct this inquiry, or what would happen to anyone found to have misbehaved.

Given the frequency with which one name was mentioned at conference, the inquiry may not have very much inquiring to do.