First published on August 1st, 2013, following Manning's conviction. Rewritten throughout on August 22nd in light of Manning's sentencing and public coming out.

The news that the person called Bradley Manning in the bulk of media stories over the past few years is more correctly called "Chelsea" was, to say the least, surprising to those of us who followed the case closely. We had, for the most part, thought she preferred "Breanna." Other than this detail, however, the  "sudden" revelation that Manning was a trans woman was neither sudden nor a revelation. In fact, understanding anything about this case without that information is essentially impossible. The sole reason that Chelsea Manning is going to spend the next thirty-five years in prison is that she is transgender. For this reason, she was and is being systematically psychologically tortured by the US Army with the express consent of the civilian government. And the sole reason for any of this is that it’s easier to publicly lynch a trans woman than it is to address the criminal deficiencies of the US Military in the course of the now ostensibly concluded Iraq War.

Let us then review the facts. Well before she leaked classified information to the public, Manning openly identified in multiple conversations as experiencing Gender Identity Disorder. Manning actively maintained a female persona named Breanna. Manning dressed in female clothing. And Manning visibly experienced severe psychological distress stemming from these facts. All of this can be summarized succinctly: Manning actively took on a female identity, and did so long before the events she's ostensibly going to prison for.

A brief word on those events. For the purposes of this discussion, at least, let us going to set aside the question of whether Manning's leaks were correct or moral. (For the record, I think they were, but this is mostly beside the point.) Instead let us take as read that the military itself would have preferred that Manning not give a mass of classified documents to Wikileaks. Certainly it has seemed terribly upset about it since it has happened. But if, in fact, this was something they did not want to happen, their behavior prior to it actually happening is almost completely impossible to explain.

There can be few places in American society more rawly hostile to a trans woman than the military. There are no easy ways to reject the identity that one has held for two decades. Transitioning is an often brutal and lonely process, and that’s for the people lucky enough to be able to afford it. Even with trans-friendly health insurance the costs of a surgical transition can easily reach $20k. And trans-friendly health insurance is the invisible pink unicorn of the American healthcare system. Indeed, adequate support in general is essentially unheard of for trans people - I can count on zero hands the number of trans people I have met to have been given access to adequate mental health resources, hormone therapies, surgical options, and a support network of family and friends.

In 2009, Chelsea Manning had none of them. Cast adrift in a military where the comparatively more accepted phenomenon of homosexuality (which has been inexplicably treated as the primary issue with Manning) was still criminalized, there was nothing resembling a support network for her. The Army Hospitals near Baghdad were not offering hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery. Indeed, Manning’s existing support network of an online community of fellow trans people - a slender branch on which far too many trans people have to stake all hope even of the basic human need for friendship - was largely taken away from her upon entering the military.  As for mental health resources…

Actually, let’s pause for a moment here. It is easy for those of us who are cisgender to fail to appreciate the sheer and unrelenting mental agony that is being transgender without having actually transitioned. A staggering 41% of transgender people attempt suicide, compared to 1.6% of the general population.

These numbers, however, merely provide a sense of the extremes. They do not get at the heart of the issue - the phenomenon known as dysphoria. The concept of dysphoria is simple. It is the set of emotions and feelings caused by the constant knowledge that your self-identity and your physical body are at odds. Metaphors do not do the concept justice. The closest parallel that might be familiar to the general public is the phenomenon of phantom limb pain, in which the brain of an amputee refuses to recognize that the lost limb is gone and continues to frantically and agonizingly insist upon its presence. Except instead of having one appendage that the brain and physical reality differ violently on the trans person is forced to react with perpetual horror to the fact that their entire body is wrong. One trans blogger, Kinsey Hope, describes it viscerally: “That deep down instinctual feeling of “what the fuck”-ness that you get when you see a shattered knee bending a leg the wrong way or even worse see that bent leg on yourself. It’s not rational. It doesn’t make logical sense. It’s utter instinctual response. That’s bodily dysphoria.”

This is what Chelsea Manning was suffering when she was stationed in Iraq. Indeed, it is likely what she was suffering from 24/7. She was open with her supervisors about this. And yet she received no meaningful assistance. When she was found on the floor curled in the fetal position, she received no assistance. When she flipped over a table and attempted to grab a gun from a gun rack, she received no assistance. The only counseling offered to her was designed merely as triage - to get her back to work. Despite widespread awareness of her mental health issues, at no point prior to her arrest for providing classified information to Wikileaks did anyone do anything that could even remotely be considered “treatment.”

By the military’s own admission, Manning should have been discharged in December of 2009, after the gun rack incident. She should also, under military procedure at least, surely have been discharged when she came out to her roommate, in violation of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. DADT was, after all, used to force soldiers such as Dan Choi, an Arabic translator of vital importance, out of the military because they were gay. This was one of the major reasons why it was, quite rightly, eventually abolished with full support from military hierarchy - it was being used to force good soldiers out of the military. And yet at the height of DADT a Private with gender identity disorder and severe mental health issues resulting from it, who had come out to another soldier, was not only left in the military but put in close proximity to classified information. How could this have even happened?

Part of it, surely, was that the entire security system surrounding this supposedly vital information was, for lack of a better description, a sick joke. Passwords were routinely left in Post-It note on supposedly secure terminals, and no checks were made to ensure that sensitive information wasn’t taken out of the facility. Reports indicate that it was common for soldiers to entertain themselves with pirated DVDs bought from the Iraqi population, a security hole that is mind-wrenching in its vastness. Given the obvious lack of serious concern for security it cannot be called a surprise that nobody thought anything of giving Manning access to it. The security hole left by giving an obviously mentally ill woman access to classified information was one of dozens of comparably sized holes. The fact of the matter is that nobody cared about the security of this material until the leaking of it became an embarrassment for the State Department. Classification has long since become a reflexive process with no relationship to actual risk assessment - better to classify something for no reason than risk leaving something unclassified. As a result, classified information is widely recognized as valueless among those who deal with it.

But the larger part of it is even more unseemly. Manning was kept in place for the same reasons that justified the grotesque abuses of the Stop-Loss procedures that kept soldiers on a merry-go-round of endless deployments. Simply put, in order to feed the grotesque beast that was the Iraq War, the military couldn’t afford to be picky about who it let in. The fact that Manning was manifestly unfit for duty - her supervisors have admitted that the gun rack incident alone was grounds for discharge - wasn’t allowed to matter. Given the choice between the size of military presence in Iraq and the safety of it, the United States Government made the conscious choice to prioritize size.

This is the real shocking truth of Chelsea Manning - that there were hundreds more soldiers who were equally obvious disasters waiting to happen. All of them were allowed - indeed, required to serve out their deployment. I would suggest that the military should consider itself lucky that Manning was the only such disaster to actually happen, but this would require pretending that incidents like Abu Ghraib, the Collateral Murder video itself, and the entire litany of horrors and human rights abuses that took place in the name of the War on Terror did not happen. Stories about how military recruiters routinely advised applicants to lie on their applications, or about how “medical waivers” were issued to allow physically unfit applicants to be recruited. In the end, the military wanted warm bodies in Iraq. Little else was allowed to matter.

This alone is criminally negligent. By paying inadequate attention to mental health issues among its personnel the Army ended up leaving someone with crippling mental illness in the proximity of classified data. That something bad happened as a result cannot be called a surprise. This is, after all, the entire reason that security screening exists. Chelsea Manning was not, by the Army’s own standards, an appropriate person to leave unattended with classified intelligence. And yet she was put in exactly that position. To blame her for the consequences of that decision would seem particularly sadistic, or, at least, it would if it didn’t have to be put in context with everything else done to Chelsea Manning.

Faced with the choice between admitting to systemic failures of good sense that had resulted in considerable embarrassment (but little else) or between lashing out at a mentally ill woman who should have been given help long before the situation turned out as it did, the United States unambiguously went all in on the latter option. What happened next is nothing short of a slow-motion lynching.

Obviously the phrase “lynching” is incendiary. However I do not choose it lightly. Central to the concept of lynching is that it is an act of appalling violence that is done both extrajudicially and on a societal level, and done for no reasons other than hatred of the victim's very identity. That what happened to Manning has (thus far) proved non-lethal is ultimately beside the point. In terms of horror, it is more than made up for by the agonizingly languid pace of her suffering. And more generally, for all that the term "lynching" is inflammatory, there is simply not a word that comes closer to capturing the obscenity of what we did to Chelsea Manning.

The initial torture of Manning was, in point of fact, extrajudicial. After her arrest and trial, however, none of this was treated as particularly relevant. The judiciary was all too willing to rubber stamp the military's decision-making, as it historically always has been when confronted with a lynch mob. In the process we all became Chelsea Manning's torturers. And our most profound and galling act of torture was to pretend that this was about something other than the fact that she was trans.

This torture extended well beyond her jailers. Statements of support for Manning were limited to the computer hacker subculture and to defenses of the moral legitimacy of leaking the diplomatic cables. None are offered from the transgender community or on the basis of her obviously poor mental health. A Google News search on “Bradley Manning Transgender” found just one or two results prior to her post-sentencing exit from the closet. On the whole, it was, bizarrely, Gawker that covered this seemingly crucial aspect of the story best. An entire international media system focused at times obsessively on this case, and imposed what amounted to an informational blackout lest some of its most disturbing facets come out. This does not extend merely to the fact that Manning is trans, but the entire culture that surrounded her leak. The fact that she should not have been in that position in the first place is largely and consciously ignored.

But what is more chilling is the way in which this suppression seems calculated. To exhaustively list the obscene lapses of judgment on the part of mainstream news sources would be impossible. I will instead limit myself to the highlights. There was, as already mentioned, a troubling tendency to equate Manning’s transgender status with homosexuality. There was the CNN coverage that, in discussing the table overturning incident, omits all mention of the most serious part of it - the attempt to grab a weapon from the gun rack. The same CNN story inexplicably referred to Breanna as Manning’s “alleged” female alter ego, a hedge that has no basis except to make it seem as though the facts are less clear than they are. This is typical of coverage. The fact of Manning’s gender dysphoria was regularly acknowledged, but any consideration of this fact’s massive implications was consciously, deliberately, avoided. Even today the announcement is being ignored, with CNN reporting that "he wants to live as a woman," a spectacular missing of the point that would be funny if humor were actually still possible in this sorry mess.

And yet for all that the information was ignored, it is equally difficult to argue that it wasn't central to why Manning has been made to suffer the way she has. She was charged, ultimately, not because of the severity of her crimes, but because she was a convenient scapegoat. Given the choice between addressing the diseased military culture that thought giving a mentally ill trans woman security clearance was a good idea and locking the trans woman up, we can hardly be surprised that the military opted for the altogether tidier solution of locking Chelsea Manning up and throwing away the key. No doubt to many of her jailers she was a freak who self-evidently belonged behind bars anyway.

What is perhaps more surprising is the evident passion that the military and civilian government had for making sure that Manning was thoroughly punished for the untenable situation they put her in. Manning’s attorneys were blocked from calling all but two of the forty-eight witnesses they attempted to call, and the prosecutor moonlighted as an employee of the same Justice Department that is attempting to arrest and charge the person to whom Manning is alleged to have leaked the documents. Military prosecutors refused all attempts at a plea-bargain, offering only the concession of promising not to actually seek the death penalty for the staggeringly severe charge of aiding the enemy. And now she's set for a prison sentence that will finally allow her freedom at the age of sixty.

This too brings up disturbing memories of lynching and the tacit complicity of the state in such crimes. What characterized lynching - indeed, what caused it - was the knowledge on the part of the lynch mob that they were safe. The justice system was designed to let them go. It is the horrific state of affairs where every single check and balance has failed, and where the state’s institutional disdain for a certain segment of its citizenship becomes a de facto open season on them. This is what makes Manning’s fate so utterly abhorrent - the fact that there was both a systemic failure that allowed her crimes to happen and a systemic decision to prioritize punishing her as severely as possible over addressing that failure.

The determination to convict Manning, however, does not hold a candle to the treatment Manning was subjected to in the year and a half during which the government dragged its feet on her trial. For a solid year Chelsea Manning was put in solitary confinement. In a belated farce of an acknowledgment of her mental health issues she was put on suicide watch and left naked in her cell. Remember that her mental health issues stem primarily from her own gender dysphoria and consider the psychological impact of being abandoned, naked, to contemplate the body you are trapped in. Seemingly nobody considered the possibility that her suicidal tendencies might be caused by the combination of gender dysphoria and the fact that her contact with the outside world consisted of twenty minutes a day of being shackled in the sun. Past that, she was left to crane her neck to see a reflection of a window barely visible from her cell.

But the word “lynching” further suggests that this sort of brutality is normal. Tragically, however, the death of transgender people is all too normal. It is impossible to look at the act of charging Manning with a capital crime outside of the context of the horrific violence to which transgender people are subjected on a regular basis. 61% of transgender people report being the victims of physical assault, and 64% report being the victims of sexual assault. The homelessness rate among the transgender population is 20%. Of those, fully 29% report being turned away from homeless shelters because of their gender identity.

Like Manning’s story, these stories are routinely underreported. When they are reported there is a shocking lack of respect for the gender identity of the victims. Their transgender status is often treated as an odd character trait. The names that they actively rejected are routinely described as their “real names” while the identities they actually lived under are treated as aliases and alter egos. In this regard there is nothing even remotely unusual about the way in which Manning’s identity is serially ignored by the media. Like the scores of trans sex workers murdered by their clients or those who overdosed self-medicating their pain, she’s ultimately disposable, except inasmuch as her death fulfills some other agenda.

Unsurprisingly, even gay rights groups remained silent during the Manning trial. Manning, after all, was apparently not a gay man but a heterosexual woman. For all that the standard acronym ends with a T for transgender, the trans population has long been incidental to large swaths of the gay rights lobby. The HRC consciously offered concessions on legal protections for trans people in exchange for progress on gay marriage. That they should decline to fish Chelsea Manning out from under the bus they threw her under is as unsurprising as every other fact in this desperately sorry affair.

Finally, of course, there are the moments of individual culpability. Adrian Lamo has become something of a pariah in circles that previously feted him for his conduct in all of this. Still, it's worth highlighting. It is not so much the decision that what Manning told him needed to be reported. No matter what one's personal position on the ethics of Manning's leaks, the position that they were dangerous and needed to be reported to authorities is at least an understandable one. What is less easy to simply accept is Lamo's decision to reassure Manning that what she said would be kept private.

To reiterate, Manning came to Lamo in part because of Lamo's openness about his own struggles with depression. Lamo looked at someone who came to him for help, reassured her that "I’m a journalist and a minister. You can pick either, and treat this as a confession or an interview (never to be published) & enjoy a modicum of legal protection." He then proceeded to play the sympathetic confidant, gathering Manning's confessions, and even having the gall to try to get Manning to hook him up with Julian Assange before calmly turning around and selling Manning out to her military superiors.

The horror here is not that Lamo turned Manning in, but that he chose to play the supportive confidant for so long before doing so. It is the double-edged nature of Lamo's behavior that is so shocking; the fact that someone who Manning turned to for the help she so obviously and so desperately needed pretended to give that help while stabbing her in the back. That Lamo kept fishing for more information, kept going back, pretending to be Manning's friend seems, like so much else in this case, an almost gratuitous excess. That Manning should be turned in by the one person who actually, for a brief moment, appeared to be giving her what she should have been given from the start - someone to help her with her obvious and understandable psychological difficulties - is a cruel irony, not least of all because there was another way.

And that is, in the end, the truth of it. There were so many other ways this cold have gone. Every single step along the road to Chelsea Manning's lynching was preventable by any number of people. The only person who couldn't stop it - who was trapped in a nightmare she couldn't do anything about, one that was tearing her apart and breaking her down to where she was no longer competent to make decisions regarding the classified information she was being made to handle - was Chelsea Manning herself. Everyone else in this sorry story could have done something. Someone could have decided not to ignore an obvious security risk. Someone could have decided that the military's need for analysts was not more important than looking at an obviously mental ill woman and saying "look, you don't belong here." Someone could have gone after some other link in the chain of idiotic decisions that led to the leak instead of scapegoating the most vulnerable person involved. Someone could have decided against torturing her for a year. Someone could have decided not to try to put her in jail for the rest of her life. Any of these decisions would have averted what happened. And nobody made a single one of them.

There’s one image, in all of this, that gets me. I can read about virtually any detail of the sickening affair that the media at large has called the Bradley Manning Trial with nothing more than the exhaustedly simmering rage that accompanies most news stories. Except for the little detail that Manning kept a fairy wand on her desk while on deployment.

Trans people often fixate on images like this - the butterfly is another one. Because for the butterfly the transition from the wrong body to the beautiful one they want isn’t years of pain and ostracizing. It’s just a nap. In this case it’s the image that someone kind could finally, at some crucial moment, intervene. That all it would take to make all of the pain go away is the right person waving a magic wand or sprinkling a bit of fairy dust. That someone could just come by and say “yes, I understand what you’re going through, here, let me help you.” There’s a beautiful innocence to it.

Chelsea Manning’s fairy never came. Instead, over and over again, individual people looked at the situation and made the decision that the systematic torture of Chelsea Manning was an acceptable price to pay. And yet if you ask what was bought in exchange for this price it remains difficult to give any sort of answer. The underlying failures of security that allowed Manning’s leaks to take place remain. No security has been gained. The only crime that has been addressed is by far the smallest of the lot. All that can be said to have been gained by the torture of Chelsea Manning is, in the end, the basic fact that she gas suffered unfathomably, and will keep doing so for the next thirty-five years.

Apparently that's benefit enough.

Though they have mentioned this before it would appear that the Drewitt-Barlow's, regulars on day time television and same-sex parenting pioneers, really are going to sue the Church of England in order to enable them to marry in a CofE church.

Among a certain kind of Twitter user this has already evoked the reaction one would expect. Not only are there grumpy statements of "we knew this would happen" but some are already acting as if the Drewitt-Barlow's have won the case and churches all over the country are now being forced to marry people they don't want to.

To them I'd say: hold your horses! One lawsuit doesn't make a persecution. Maybe express your opposition and wait and see the outcome before becoming convinced the world is out to get you. Some Christians don't just wear a cross, they carry it on their back and act like they are being marched off to their crucifixion. Do they want to build a coalition with those who want to protect them or just be all self-pitying? I'm guessing the latter.

Meanwhile back in the real world. I've no doubt that Tony and Barrie Drewitt-Barlow sincerely wish to get married in their local church. And I've no doubt they sincerely believe it is their right, especially given the onerous fact that we have an established church in this country who previously had the requirement of marrying anyone in their parish (within reason). But I also believe they are wrong to be pursuing change within the Church of England in this manner.

Forcing people to do things against their wishes (unless they are taking our money without our own free choice of who gets it, i.e. Government employees) goes against the spirit of what the LGBT rights movement has worked for throughout its life. And if you don't agree with that then try: I personally think it goes against the spirit of what the LGBT rights movement should have been working for. The right to choose freely, the right to be true to yourself, the right to live in peace. These are cherished things all reasonable people should support.

Change must come from within anti-LGBT religious organisations. As an atheist I've little interest in changing what a church supports. But I'd hope that if you were interested in that sort of thing, you'd do so from the inside. The Church of England has procedures for change, though these work at a similar speed to cooling lava I accept, and it is through these procedures (as the Government has suggested) that changes such as supporting same-sex marriage should be made.

Forcing an organisation to accept something they don't wish to risks creating a martyr complex, and many Christians have a big enough one of those already. Suing the church is bad for the church (as it doesn't come to terms with the change through internal debate), bad for LGBT rights (as we become the bad guys) and bad for freedom in general. If we are to have the freedom to love who we wish, then we must allow others the freedom to worship as they wish.

Have we not learnt anything from those who despise us on how to be better people than them?

The recent death of Dennis Farina led me to watch Michael Mann’s Manhunter for the first time in years, and from thence Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs.  Thanks to time, tide, and certain mores of the Internet Age, the former is now often trumpeted as the truly great Hannibal Lecter film, and while it would be the height of absurdity to call the latter underrated, it has lost much of the luster that made it one of the most celebrated films in American history in the 1990s.  Demme’s picture held up considerably better than I’d remembered; its virtues, not only as a work of surprising visual skill and a powerfully effective thriller, but as a subversively feminist work that not only went against the tenor of its times but also could scarcely be made today, are much clearer now that the time for movies of that sort is largely over.

I didn’t want to write about Silence, though, for the sole reason that a thousand other people have already done so, plenty of them more effectively than I ever could.  But there is one aspect of the movie that I did give a considerable amount of thought, and I wanted to write about it here, however discursively.  Justly celebrated by many critics as an expertly acted movie, The Silence of the Lambs is largely remembered now for the Oscar-winning performance of Anthony Hopkins in the role of Hannibal Lecter.  Although widely praised, the win caught a number of people by surprise, because he nabbed Best Actor for a film in which he was on screen for less than twenty minutes.  (I’d also argue, as further evidence of the female-centered nature of Demme’s film, that not only was Hopkins essentially playing a supporting role, but that there was, in fact, no male lead whatsoever.)  It’s even more curious when you consider some of the rest of the performances in Silence; Demme is especially generous in fleshing out smaller roles and giving what would otherwise be bit parts a great deal of professionalism, character and emotional depth, including the turnkey Barney, the police commander Sgt. Tate, or FBI trainee Ardelia Mapp.  And, of course, Jodie Foster is terrific as Clarice Starling, vulnerable and tenuous but also bright, focused and filled with great inner reserves.  Demme uses a powerful test on his actors, shooting them in strong close-up at critical moments, giving them nothing to hide behind in their performances and forcing them to convey the emotional weight of a scene on their faces alone; in this way, he is able to coax exceptional performances out of superstars and bit players alike.

But when we say that Foster is or is not superior to Hopkins in the film, what do we really mean?  What common ground do we cover when we explore the vital necessity of good acting to a movie?  Thousands of books have been written on the subject, but it’s a bit flustering to discover how little we are able to come to an agreement about what, exactly, we mean by a good on-screen performance.  Part of this is that we all have different expectations, of course; part of it is that actors themselves are prone to muddying the waters with self-aggrandizing definitions of their “craft” (which acting is not, or at least not just; like most creative endeavors, it is part art, part skill, part craft, and part trade, but calling it a craft merely is to both reduce it and to overvalue it).  It is a long time now since we realized that there are vast gulfs of difference between acting for the screen and acting for the stage, and we are finally coming to terms with the idea that there are different standards of acting that should be applied to different kinds of films.  This is part of what acting coaches and teachers mean when they talk about the emotional truth of a scene; just as a singer must always be heard to believe in the truth, however banal, of the words that she sings, an actor must always convey to the audience that she believes what she is feeling and accepts the situation she is in, and the requirements of that conveyance can fluctuate wildly from a horror film to an action epic to an intimate drama.

Consider this, though:  we cannot define good acting by a consistent approach to a role, nor can we establish a method of exacting truth out of a role that applies equally to all aspects of acting.  But even more thorny is the fact that we cannot really even define what good acting is unless we have a rather complex framework in which to do so.  One commonly accepted definition of good acting, and the one from whence we derive the name of ‘art’, is the ability to convincingly portray a specific character to an audience.  This is where a great deal of craft comes in as well, as many actors develop little tricks to help them remain more vivid and memorable in our minds, as did Hopkins, who made a great effort not to blink whenever the camera was on him in The Silence of the Lambs.  This was a neat little tic, as it reinforced the idea of Lecter as a clear-eyed, hyper-intense ghoul, always observing his prey for a sign of weakness; it is part of why those 18 minutes he is in screen are so electrifying.  The problem is, it’s completely constructed.  No one behaves in such a way in the real world.  It required an entirely different approach to the art of acting than did the scenes in which Foster gasps in blind terror as she is stalked through darkness by Jame Gumb, or nearly weeps in frustration as Lecter teases out a little more of her personal life as Catherine Martin’s life slowly ticks away.

This brings us to another definition of acting:  the ability to seem utterly real.  Acting is not real, of course; it is pure façade.  Except, of course, when it isn’t.  There are dozens of amazing films (though many of them are not in the English language) in which actors of limited experience, amateurs, children, even non-actors deliver staggeringly good performances, often because they are playing themselves; other times because they rapidly and cleverly assess the nature of the character and are able to realistically inhabit it; and sometimes simply because they have a face, a body, or a voice that is simply perfectly natural for the kind of character that they are playing.  There is a tradition, particularly in New Wave and neo-realist cinema, of using non-actors; what they are dong cannot be considered acting in any meaningful sense of the word — and yet because what they are doing is all art and no craft, they often give astounding performances, the likes of which could never be duplicated by even the most hardworking Hollywood star.

If Hopkins, on the one end, embodies the extreme of the ‘stunt’ actor, employing a panoply of gimmicks, trucs, and calculated moves that have not even a hint of real truth to them but which somehow come together with such skill and force as to make the portrayal of a character unthinkable by anyone else; and if Foster represents the idealized middle, with the actor as both serious artist, drawing on reserves of inner emotion and personal feeling to create an outward impression, and a dedicated craftsperson, learning verbal and physical techniques to conjure realness out of falsehood, the other extreme might be this children of Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies.  Using a cast of age-appropriate children, most of whom had limited or no acting ability and improvised much of their dialogue and behavior (they had not read the book, and had to have each scene explained to them), Brook made a film that, while highly praised, is often singled out for the shaky acting.  Brook had huge difficulties working with the kids, and on screen, they come off awfully spotty, like a pack of wild animals more interested in jackassing around than…well, you get the idea:  Brooks’ cast are criticized to this day for portraying their characters with impossible fidelity.  They all act exactly like a bunch of school kids their age would act in a similar situation; they literally could not be doing a better job at being actors.  And yet we attack them for being, in essence, insufficiently actorly.

When Joe Queenan wrote about bad accents in movies over a decade ago, he noted that what made a movie accent bad wasn’t whether or not it was unrealistic or affected or incompetent.  Discussing one actresses’ impenetrable dialect, he admitted that he had no idea whether or not it was a ‘bad’ German accent; “How would I know?” he asked.  ”I don’t speak German.”  What made it bad is that it ate up the whole movie; it called so much attention to itself that it was impossible to think about anything else.  This is a risk with many great actors; Hopkins skates right up to the edge of it in Silence, and many legendary performances careen right over into the abyss where all we can talk about, for good or ill, is their attention-grabbing role.   We overvalue such performances (many of the commonly checked ‘greatest performances of all time’ are just such over-the-top nonsense) just as much as we undervalue quiet, naturalistic performances that are so believably unspectacular that they practically disappear.  It may be as impossible to define good acting as it is to identify pornography; we know it when we see it, and we are often looking at it accompanied by bad acting in the very same film — even by the very same actor.  If there is one commonality in it all, it is that the good actor convinces us that he is what he is trying to be at all times he is present, even when what he is trying to be is nothing.

They dare to tamper with the forces of creation?

The inner core of the Earth is a ball of solid iron about 2400 km across – 2/3 the size of the Moon. Its temperature is 5400 °C – about the same as the surface of the Sun. And it’s freezing.

When the Earth first formed, its interior was molten all the way through. Gradually it cooled, and the centre solidified. Although still incredibly hot by human standards – iron melts at about 1500 °C in the open air – the high pressure caused by the weight of all the Earth pressing down upon the core raises its melting point so that it freezes solid even at these sunlike temperatures. The interior is still cooling, and the solid inner core is slowly growing as the lowest layers of molten iron in the outer core freeze onto it.

Now freezing releases heat. If that seems an odd statement, think of it this way. You have to put in heat to melt a solid, using energy to break the molecular bonds. So if you reverse the process, as a liquid freezes that same heat must be given up.

That’s important in the Earth’s core. The heat released by freezing at the boundary between the inner and outer cores drives convection currents that make the liquid outer core roil and swirl restlessly.

Iron, of course, is a magnetic material, and all that circulation of liquid iron generates a powerful magnetic field. This field reaches to the surface of the Earth and far beyond into deep space. It allows seafarers to navigate with a magnetic compass, shields our planet from the full anger of the Sun, and channels the solar wind to the polar caps to create the shimmering curtains of the aurora.

As we move up through the outer core, the pressure drops and the temperature decreases. Once we get about 3500 km out from the centre, we hit another boundary. Above this depth, the composition changes. We are too high up for the heavy iron that sank towards the centre. Instead we have something more like ordinary rock, predominantly silicates, but under temperatures and pressures that are far from ordinary. This is not the flowing fluid of the outer core : neither is it the crystalline solid of the inner core or the crust. Instead it is an incredibly viscous, slowly flowing material called the mantle.

To get a handle on how this stuff behaves, we can look at the world’s longest-running scientific experiment – the pitch drop experiment.

Tar pitch is about the most viscous substance in human experience. To get an idea of what this means, go into the kitchen. Fill a glass with water, and stir it. Easy, isn’t it? That’s because water had low viscosity. Now try stirring a jar of honey. That’s a lot harder – the viscosity of honey is about ten thousand times that of water. If you have some peanut butter, give that a stir. It’s about 25 times more viscous than honey, and about the most viscous thing you’re likely to have lying around.

Tar pitch is a million times more viscous than peanut butter.

The original pitch drop experiment started at the University of Queensland in Brisbane in 1927, and is still going strong. It’s quite simple, really: a funnel is filled with tar pitch, and a drop slowly forms at the bottom of the funnel as the tar flows out, eventually dropping off, and then a new drop forms. They’ve recorded a drop every eight years or so. Just recently, a similar experiment at Trinity College Dublin was the first to record a drop falling on camera. (The Queensland experiment missed filming its most recent drop because the camera was offline.)

Mantle is ten trillion times more viscous than tar. Ten million trillion times more viscous than peanut butter.

So it’s incredibly stiff, but still more like tar than ordinary rock: it has no crystalline structure, and flows, however slowly, under pressure.

That lot makes up the bulk of planet Earth. On the outside edges there are some details: mantle that flows more readily thanks to the low pressure near the surface and, floating on top of it, some solid plates of cold, brittle rock on which various biological organisms live out their brief, meager lives.

So what the hell are we to make of the Dalek’s plan to remove the core of the Earth? First of all, if they want to do this by drilling a hole through the crust, Bedfordshire is a terrible place to do this. You have to drill through 30 km of crust there, as opposed to less than 10 km on the ocean floor. If underwater operations are too much of a drag, somewhere like southwest Ireland would still be a lot easier.

Wherever they drill, they are going to drop some device down into the core and suck out all the molten material. Presumably through some kind of magnetic funnel, but this is the Daleks so I wouldn’t put it past them to use a giant bendy straw. However they do it, what are the effects?

The first thing this would do is reduce the pressure on the solid inner core. This is still very hot, so once the pressure drops it will start to melt. As it does so, it will be sucked out along with the outer core, leaving the Earth entirely hollow.

(Top tip : never try to find scientific information on this subject by googling “hollow earth”. You will descend into a swirling vortex of maniacs and conspiracy theorists.)

Imagine the interior of the Earth at this point. It’s a great hollow cavern 7000 km across. There’s no gravitational force. This is because a particle inside a spherical shell experiences a force towards the nearest part of the shell, and an opposite force towards the furthest part. The lesser distance of the nearest part, and the greater volume of the furthest part, exactly cancel each other out, resulting in zero net force.

And it’s hot. The inner surface is at a temperature of around 3500 °C, hot enough to glow red. Not only is it hot, but it can’t cool down, except by losing heat slowly upwards through the remaining shell of the Earth. It’s radiating heat into the vacuum inside the Earth, but any given patch of this inner surface will not only lose heat through radiation, it will also absorb radiation emitted from the rest of the surface. These two processes exactly balance each other. Like gravity, radiation follows an inverse square law, and so the same mathematics that tells us the gravitational force inside the shell is zero also tells us that there is no net loss of heat.

It’s also melting. With the removal of the core, and hence the removal of its gravitational pull, the pressure on the mantle has dropped. That pressure was the only thing keeping it solid at these high temperatures, and with the loss of that pressure it will undergo decompressive melting. Indeed, this will happen as the core is being removed, so we can expect the mantle to liquefy and be sucked out as well in its turn.

Of course, as you are removing the mantle from the inside out, you will be taking the hottest material first and gradually working outwards into progressively cooler mantle. At some point, you will reach a level where the temperature is low enough that the mantle will not melt even though the pressure has been radically reduced. Actually calculating where that point is would be a substantial research project, and one for which it would be difficult to obtain funding. We can, however, put some upper bound on the answer. The temperature at which mantle rock melts on the surface of the Earth is about 1300 °C. That corresponds to a depth of about 200 km or so. Our remaining shell of the Earth isn’t going to get thinner than this, and may stay somewhat thicker.

So by the end of all this the Daleks have removed about 90% of the Earth’s volume, leaving behind a brittle solid crust sitting on top of a thin spherical shell of ductile rock. We have to hope that this lower layer is strong enough to hold together under its own self-gravity and the weight of the crust above it, otherwise this planet is going to implode like a cheap meringue.

Even if that doesn’t happen, the consequences for life on the surface will be catastrophic. All of this planetary-scale geoengineering will at the very least cause the crust to buckle and fracture as the mantle beneath is disrupted and removed. It will be like every earthquake, every volcano and every tsunami in history hitting all at once.

With the Earth’s mass reduced by more than 90%, the surface gravity will drop by the same fraction. The Earth will be no more able to hold on to an atmosphere than the Moon – indeed, even less so, as the Moon’s surface gravity is one sixth of Earth’s. Not only will there be nothing to breath, but there will be no protection from the Sun’s hard UV and X-rays. And as if that weren’t enough, the Earth’s magnetic field will have vanished along with the liquid core, leaving the planetary surface fully exposed to the solar wind.

The surface will freeze, of course. In the absence of an atmosphere, the equilibrium temperature for the Earth is about -18 °C. The greenhouse effect may have become a threat in recent decades, but it is still the only thing that keeps our planet habitable. Given that the Daleks want to zoom the hollow Earth around in space, however, we can assume that the temperature will drop even further. Gradually the remaining mantle layer will cool, becoming brittle, and sooner or later it will be meringue time – unless the Daleks have some cunning plan for preventing this.

Quite how this zooming about is supposed to be achieved is unclear. All we know is that the Daleks intend to place some kind of power system within the hollow Earth. It will need to be anchored somehow to the inner surface to prevent it drifting out of position, otherwise it would crash into the inside of the Earth whenever the planet moved. Beyond that, it’s hard to say.

What’s even harder to discern is why the Daleks are carrying out this apparently bonkers plan. There doesn’t seem to be any practical purpose that couldn’t be achieved a lot more easily and with a lot less risk simply by building a fleet of spaceships. Such as, for example, the spaceships they used to invade Earth with in the first place. The whole scheme just seems entirely redundant. Whatever purpose it might serve, it is not one that is apparent from the story or from any rational consideration.

I reckon they’re just doing it for a laugh.

I have applied and failed to get a job that I’m not only completely qualified for, but is the one of the ONLY jobs that my very specific skill set prepares me for, and I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. So obviously I’m perfect for a high pressure job where my only qualification is having a lot of opinions about Batman.

Back in 2011, when we first heard the news about DC doing a universe wide reboot, many of my fellow fans were shocked, but also many had ideas, and a few people in the blogosphere chimed in with what they wold consider their ideal 52 comics. Well, I’m nothing if not two years behind current fashion, but I’ve finally come up with what I would put forward as my ideal 52 lineup.

But first, the set up for this line:

1. Variety, in terms of characters and in terms of genres. There is room for grimdark! There is also room for bright cheerful saving the world with a smile! At least 10 of my 52 books are flagged as suitable for Young Readers – some aimed at children, some at teenagers (which means it still has sex and drama and heavy themes, but less of the violence for the sake of violence.) The silver age favorites get to stay, but their predecessors aren’t shunted to the side.

2. Creativity. It’s such a cheap shot to point at the way DC are treating their creators right now, but look at the way DC are treating their creators right now. (Actually today the most recent stupid thing isn’t treating a creator like shit, but just you wait.) But wouldn’t it be nice if we could go for a month without a writer or an artist being levered out of their job in a way that causes the kind of blow out we’ve been seeing? Anyway, the writing goes to the team on each individual book. Creative teams get to be creative. Obviously when I start outlining the book line up you’ll say “but you’ve written these already” to which I say SHUSH THIS IS A FANTASY LINEUP GAWSH.

3. Continuity is both important and not unimportant. Crossovers happen. Most of the books take place in a universe where events impact each other. The Wonder Woman in her own title is the same character as the Wonder Woman in her team books. But people reading either book can follow the plots without having to constantly buy both. Small continuity differences between books are acknowledged, even encouraged.

Okay, let me lay it down about continuity: there is both one universe and 52. Reality is not discrete, it is not objective. It is continuous between the perceptions and the interpretations of the people who experience it. Things don’t happen because of genre conventions, genre conventions dictate how we perceive things. Actual events create different stories according to the teller. The DC Universe already acknowledges that, see the B:TAS episode POV. There’s a different universe for each book, a different universe for each writer, hell, there’s a different universe for each reader, and that’s okay.

Having said that, creators are encouraged to read each other’s work and try and keep them coherent. No robot Alfreds!

I’ve divided the line into eleven sections: Super, Bat, Wonder, Lantern, Justice, Other Solos, Magic, No tights no capes, the grey area, Out Of Time and Team Ups/Showcases, and I’ll start tomorrow with my very uninformed opinion of the Supers.

(P.S. No, I still haven’t read many Superman books. Yes, I still have opinions. Sssssssssshhhhh my blog.)

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - cute - search - about
← previous	July 31st, 2013	next
July 31st, 2013: NEW SHIRT! Don't you hate it when people stare at certain parts of your awesome body, instead of at the certain other parts you want them to stare at? Maybe they're just lost. This shirt will help everyone figure out which of your organs they want to check out. It features a convenient and accurate map to your face, arms, heart, gallbladder, spleen, and also your kidneys and intestines and stuff. Pancreas too, I guess? Whatever you got goin' on inside, man! I don't judge! (NOTE: if you have had a kidney removed, the "my kidneys are hereish" arrows still apply, but now they're pointing in the general direction of wherever your kidneys are now) (IT ALL STILL TOTALLY WORKS) My Face Is Up Here. One year ago today: The Two Puppies Of Verona – Ryan

So, it seems that officials from the Home Office have been showing up at tube stations in London and demanding to see proof of people's immigration status. That would be non white people's status, by the way. The Independent has more...

Witnesses who saw the operations in London claimed the officers stopped only non-white individuals, and in Kensal Green said that when questioned, the immigration officials became aggressive.

Phil O'Shea told the Kilburn Times: "They appeared to be stopping and questioning every non-white person, many of whom were clearly ordinary Kensal Green residents going to work. When I queried what was going on, I was threatened with arrest for obstruction and was told to 'crack on'."

Another witness, Matthew Kelcher, said: "Even with the confidence of a free-born Englishman who knows he has nothing to hide, I found this whole experience to be extremely intimidating. They said they were doing random checks, but a lot of people who use that station are tourists so I don't know what message that sends out to the world."

This is horrible. The idea that people are being asked for their papers as they go about their business and if they can't provide them, they are bundled up in a van, to be another statistic in a Home Office tweet, is horrible. I strongly suspect many of them will be innocent anyway - I mean, who thinks they have to take their documents with them if they are simply taking a tube ride?  Tube stations are pretty cramped anyway, so being confronted with a dozen burly Border Force types is going to be pretty intimidating.

And what if you are arrested in full public view, maybe in front of your neighbour, or the local shopkeeper, or the woman who does your eyebrows? They aren't going to necessarily know when you've been released, with no action taken, by the Home Office. They may well assume that you have done something wrong.

So why are the Tories doing this? The obvious answer is to say that they are pandering to UKIP, being seen to be doing something about this vast underworld of illegal immigrants the Daily Mail says we have. But I think that there may be more too it. They're not just trolling us, they are trying to toxify us. If they can get our voters thinking that we have abandoned our belief in civil liberties, then that's a job well done for them. They know we'll be guilty by association and the nice liberal minded people who read about it in the Independent in some of our rural England Tory facing held seats might just decide to vote Labour, or Green, or stay at home come 2015. If our voters do that, then the Tories could win some of our seats.

This is where Nick Clegg really needs to kick off. Tim Farron has already said the right things as he usually does:

@caronmlindsay @colingale @markpack I think the BF should police the borders and not our buses and tube stations.
— Tim Farron (@timfarron) August 2, 2013

We need Nick to be obviously fighting the civil liberties corner and being robust about it. The Tories don't care for civil liberties, but they have a vested interest in tarnishing our USP. We can't let them do it.

What bothers me is that there's too much emphasis on what our "electoral market" thinks. Nick's done quite well in the past few days saying what sorts of things need to happen on immigration, like exit checks and spoken out against these god awful vans. However, the language he's using is still a little too "crackdown" rather than "fairness" for me. When things like the vans or the tube station checks happen, every liberal collectively retches. However, you'll get a part of the electorate, and some of them might vote for us, feeling in some way reassured that something is being done. We talk of the importance of policing by consent. What happens if a good proportion of people consent to policing of others by intimidation? For me, it's back to first principles every time. We're liberals, and we don't agree with that sort of thing. Nick,I am very politely asking you to get your arse into gear and get these heavy-handed, authoritarian Tory tactics stopped. Now would be nice. Thanks.

Oh, and if you are fizzing mad about this, and you haven't already, for the love of goodness join Liberal Democrats for Seekers of Sanctuary. They are brilliant. It'll be the best tenner you ever spent.

@lordbonkers Really! That is the most wonderfully cynical comment I have read in a long time. Genuinely laughing out loud.
— Martin Veart (@Martin_Veart) July 26, 2013

Having had this exchange with the writer of Martin's View only a couple of days ago, I was not surprised by David Howell's bizarre contribution in the House of Lords today:

"Would you accept that it could be a mistake to think of and discuss fracking in terms of the whole of the United Kingdom in one go? 

"I mean there obviously are, in beautiful natural areas, worries about not just the drilling and the fracking, which I think are exaggerated, but about the trucks, and the delivery, and the roads, and the disturbance, and those about justified worries." 

He added: "But there are large and uninhabited and desolate areas. Certainly in part of the North East where there's plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody's residence, where we could conduct without any kind of threat to the rural environment."

One of the problems we face as a country is the way the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge dominates our national life - see this recent Guardian article on Oxbridge admissions for an example.

The result of this is that many otherwise educated people have little knowledge of large tracts of their own country and indeed think themselves rather clever because of it.

There is no way of producing energy without an environmental cost, yet opposition to wind farms galvanises Conservative activists to an extent rivalled only by the thought of illegal immigration. At the root of that is the belief that nasty things like environmental degradation should not happen to nice affluent people like them but to someone else - poor people up north somewhere.

Howell has now apologised, and when we have finished laughing at him we ought to ask what we can do to change a society that produces people like him.

Every so often, I receive a residual check for some TV show I’ve written. I’ve gotten eight or nine from the Writers Guild in the past week and I think so far, they total under ten bucks. The lowest is for an episode I wrote for Bob, the sitcom in which Mr. George Robert "Bob" Newhart played a comic book artist. The check was for a nickel. Fortunately, I do not have to give my agent back then 10% on residuals.

I was shocked…but not at the amount. I was shocked that Bob is still running somewhere.

Actually, that one may even be worth less than a nickel to me because I may not be able to cash it. It was made out to a personal corporation I no longer have (but did when I wrote that episode) and interestingly, addressed to my then-agency which is no longer in business. Fortunately, the way residuals work, it wasn’t sent to that now-extinct agency. It was sent to the Guild which forwarded it directly to me. That’s just one of about eighty thousand services the WGA does for its members. I’m guessing I could persuade my bank to accept it anyway and if not, I could send it back to its maker for a name change…but it is, after all, for five cents. It’s of more value as a conversation piece. Or scratch paper.

Such checks are not uncommon. One day one year, I sat down to lunch with Howie Morris, a wonderful actor/friend I miss very much. He hauled out a large wad of checks he’d just received and began endorsing feverishly. "I guess lunch is on you," I said…but he responded, "Take a look at some of these." They were mostly from Hanna-Barbera shows like The Flintstones and Atom Ant and there was even one in there for the episode of The Jetsons in which he played rock idol Jet Screamer and sang, "Eep Opp Ork Ah Ah." The tune went something like this…

No, come to think of it, it went exactly like that. That was, by the way, Howie’s first voice job for H-B and the first such gig he had in Hollywood when he moved out here from New York. I think the residual check he’d received that day was for well under a buck. This was back when he was doing autograph shows and selling his signature for ten, sometimes twenty dollars…but here he was writing it over and over for an average of about eleven cents. I suggested he get a rubber stamp made but he said, "No, they cost eight dollars and I’d lose money on the deal." The whole inch-thick pile turned out to be around forty dollars.

There is or was (I’m not sure of the proper tense) a bar in the valley called Residuals — a place where actors and writers could congregate and drink their checks. If you brought in one for under a buck, they’d give you a beverage in exchange and then put the check up on the wall. Makes you feel sorry for the poor guy who gets one for $1.01. If it had been for the amount of my Bob check, it might have bought something.

Every so often in one of the above-the-line Hollywood guilds, someone has a brainstorm. Whenever Paramount or Universal or any studio processes and sends a check, it costs them ‐ by some accounts — around ten bucks per transaction. If it’s that, they spent $10.05 to send me my nickel Bob check.

Such checks have prompted many to suggest the following bargain: The union and the employer agree that the latter will pay no check under, say, ten bucks directly. Instead, they will triple the amount and give it to the proper union’s pension and/or health fund. Obviously, the precise numbers can be juggled a bit but there’s surely a configuration where it would be a win/win for both sides. The studios would spend less. The writers, actors or directors would get more, albeit indirectly.

Why hasn’t this been instituted? The producers would go for it in a flash. So, I have a feeling, would the majority of members in the Writers, Actors or Directors Guilds. The obstacle seems to be that it would infuriate — and perhaps rightly-so — a minority in those labor organizations. I’m told that when it was brought up once at a Screen Actors Guild meeting, several livid actors leaped to their feet and began screaming. One reportedly hollered, "I haven’t worked in three years! Residual checks under ten dollars were all I got last year…and now my union wants to confiscate 100% of my income for the year!?"

The fellow who told me this, who worked at S.A.G., said, "It just didn’t seem worth getting so many people so upset. They really looked forward to getting those one-dollar checks." That’s apparently why this will never be instituted. But it’s still a good idea…

Saturday:

What strikes me about “The Mind of Evil” is that otherwise perfectly sensible people – Lawrence and Tat in About Time 3, Jack Graham on Shabogan Graffiti, Sandifer on the TARDIS rude room – write long essays trying to explain or taking to task this idea that “evil” is some innate quality or substance in people that the Keller Machine extracts, when self-evidently it does nothing of the sort.

That’s what the Master says it does but... well... he’s the Master!

It’s quite clear that, spoilers, the “machine” is a Mind Parasite that simply, crudely and painfully lobotomises people!


“The Mind of Evil” is, to my mind, second among Jon Pertwee’s stories only to the homely “Dennis Wheatley for a fiver” charms of “The Dæmons”. The second story of Pertwee’s second year as the Doctor, and the second to feature his newly-created arch-enemy: Roger Delgado as The Master.

And this is the story that really cements the Master in the Doctor Who firmament as the classic villain. After a great opening in Robert Holmes’ “Terror of the Autons”, Delgado comes into his suave own here as the Ernst Stavro Blofeld of the series, with a performance better even than in his first story. The plot which links an evil brain-altering machine at Stangmoor Prison, the first World Peace Conference and a nuclear gas missile (sic) called Thunderbolt is, well, faintly ludicrous and couldn’t hold together without him, but he sells us this plot as actually just the sort of thing the Master does, causing havoc on a global or local scale as the whim takes him.

It’s also a transitional story, harking back to the more “hard” (well “hard-ish”) science fiction of Pertwee’s first season while placed within the context of Barry Letts moving the series towards more psychedelic fare such as the story that follows: “The Claws of Axos”, changes that involved dumbing down the Brigadier into a comedy Little Englander and replacing scientist Liz Shaw (lovely Carry John – see the tribute on the new “Spearhead from Space” blu-ray) with rather more dolly-bird “assistant” Jo Grant (played by the irrepressible Katy Manning, who succeeds in being wonderful in spite of the writing).

Don Houghton, writing his second and sadly last Who, follows up the hugely popular “Inferno” with another story that mixes clever ideas and commentary with exciting action sequences (particularly the UNIT raid on the prison) and some nice “Spy-Fi” stuff (thanks to a happy coincidence, Benton gets to play secret agent again, as he did back in “The Invasion”).

As a result, this is about as “gritty” and “realistic” as the Pertwee years ever get (while still having a lead dressed in a purple silk cape and driving a “sprightly yellow roadster”). It’s as near to a Euston films production for children as there will ever be – interestingly, as Alex pointed out to me, thanks to director Tim Coomb making a couple of changes from male to female at casting level and because it was “for children” – i.e. not treating women as “molls” or “victims” – it’s actually got stronger roles for women characters, with them doing “everyday” jobs in two armed forces without anyone passing comment (one gratingly silly remark from Richard Franklin’s gratingly silly Captain Yates aside).

It is often pointed out that the Master’s plan in this story is not entirely sensible: he is, after all, planning to blow up the planet on which he is standing, while stranded without a working TARDIS. Perhaps he’s trying to make himself a new dematerialisation circuit and needs the fusion of a nuclear explosion to create some crucial element (or Slitheen-like wants it for fuel). Mind you, the Doctor’s a bit casual about the working dematerialisation circuit that he took from the Master in “Terror of the Autons” if it can just be picked up by a despatch rider. You’re surprised that the Master hasn’t broken into UNIT HQ and to take it before now. Perhaps he has: defeating ever more complicated safes that the Doctor has prepared for him while failing to realise that the Doctor has outsmarted him by hiding the circuit in plain sight on Liz Shaw’s now-abandoned work bench.

That plot, then, involves trouble with the Chinese delegation when UNIT is tasked to protect the World Peace Conference (while, on the side, being asked to sweep an illegal missile under the proverbial carpet on behalf of the British Government).

The Doctor, however, has taken himself off to Stangmoor Prison because he is more concerned by reports of a new “treatment” for the hardened criminal: the Keller Process of a Professor Emil Keller, in truth – as we shall discover – the Master.

Which brings us back to that “machine”.

Just look at how it works: it stimulates what we might hand-wavily call the “fear centres” of the brain, triggering a terror response and hallucinations to the point where its victims’ higher functions burn out, or they suffer a fatal heart attack or stroke. Do we ever see anyone doing “ooh ooh my brain is being sucked out” acting? No. What we see is “arrgh arrgh it’s in my head!” every time.

Why assume that it “does what it says on the tin” when what it says on the tin was written by the Master?

I mean, he’s lying about his identity as “Professor Emil Keller”, but surely he wouldn’t fib about how his machine works. Aside from the fact that it’s not actually a machine. And it doesn’t work.

That big bank of controls clearly doesn’t “control” it at all, and is probably a big box of lights and dials.

And the Doctor, rude as ever talking over the explanation at the beginning, hears Professor Kettering say what the machine does and interrupts with: “It doesn’t”!


Jack says that the story’s point of view is:

“Crime is something that people with Evil in their heads do, and people like that go to prison. If you're in prison, you're Bad. It's that simple. This is implicit. Also implicit is the assumption that humans are clockwork oranges. Use technology to remove the Evil from the brain and the brain will function properly again.”

While Sandifer has it that:

“...this script is firmly in favor of the Keller Machine... ...Bad people are inherently bad. Good people are justified in what it takes to stop bad people. And it's that simple.”

But this is clearly the point of view of the scientists and prison governors who are shown to be (a) deceived by the Master who has sold them this load of old honk and (b) totally wrong. And they pay for their error with their lives.

“The Mind of Evil” raises these points of view satirically; in order to rubbish them. It is astonishing to me that people seem not to see this.

The story repeatedly makes the point that this belief in whatever it is (bad blood, original sin, genes for criminality) is wrong, indeed is itself “evil”; I mean, the “machine” is literally the monster of this story, how blatantly obvious do they have to make it?

(Perhaps that’s the problem: when the Keller Machine turns out to be a bubbling brain in a jar, everyone starts to take everything very literally. If this was “Buffy” it would be completely obvious that the “monster” is a metaphor for Sixties-style psychiatric electro-chemical mind control being literally “monstrous”.)

The Doctor himself expresses that the process is “evil” even before he sees it in action, and his opinion is confirmed by what he sees it do to prisoner Barnham.

And the whole opening sequence is very deliberately presented to us as an execution.

The condemned man is read his sentence and solemnly taken to the place where it will be done, where witnesses, doctors and priests are in attendance.

Professor Kettering, who will be operating the “machine”, makes a speech about how “Science has abolished the death penalty” – well obviously “science” didn’t abolish the death penalty, though the allusion is clearly to the “scientific advance” of the guillotine. Remember that when this was shown in 1971, it was barely five years after the abolition of the death penalty in Great Britain, and two years before it would be abolished in Northern Ireland.

Everything about showing us this “treatment” as if we’re about to kill a man is saying to us that this “death of personality” is actually worse.


Nor does anyone – or at least anyone who cares; mainly Jo and Dr Summers (Michael Sheard), though the Doctor condescends to express concern when he remembers – think that Barnham has been “cured” or that his brain is functioning “properly” afterwards. Quite the reverse: he is hospitalised and treated as the victim of a serious accident.

Barnham is presented as childlike and innocent, which does not mean “good”. In fact it means “without knowledge of good or evil”. You might – at a pinch – say he’s been returned to the Garden of Eden. But the truth is, this serpent has taken away his free will which is pretty much the Acme of evil in ’Sixties/’Seventies Doctor Who.


Jack’s a good, old-fashioned communist and tries to make out that “this is a classic bit of reactionary Cold War ideology” where “good” Westerners are led by a proper patriarchal figure and women/Chinese/Chinese women represent the threatening “other” while the prisoners in Stangmoor are the “uppity working class” whose revolt needs putting down. Well, I suppose you can if you must, but it does seem to overlook the rather elegant way that the story has the riots in the prison parallel the threatened global conflict – as above so below, perhaps, or that the Master is in a sense goading the planet to violence at every level because he "can't resist pulling the wings off the flies", or perhaps that the threat of World War is as much a petty squabble as the one in the prison. Also, the best way to survive attack by the Keller Machine appears to be: be working class (i.e. Barnham survives but all those nice, middle-class scientists end up dying with improbable physical evidence of their phobias made manifest), while the true villain of the piece is the self-styled Lord and Master.

Sandifer, meanwhile, is keen to play up the racist aspects of the story, trying to tie it to a line between “The Celestial Toymaker” and “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”. That means having to ignore that the first Chinese Ambassador is actually the first victim of the Mind Parasite, and that his replacement, Fu Peng (Kristopher Kum), is only portrayed as sympathetic, courteous and wise – Nicholas Courtney gamely playing along in making the Brigadier look like a fool for his “Little Englander” attitude.

I’m not saying it’s completely un-dodgy (there’s only one black character and he’s a non-speaking extra as the Master’s chauffeur) but I think you are really overreaching to say that the Chinese are at all depicted as the baddies here. It’s even nice about Chairman Mao (neatly retconned in Big Finish’s “Sympathy for the Devil”).

Certainly, the story is more dubious in its treatment of women, even while giving them positive roles, because there are almost none in it. Blink and you’ll miss Corporal Bell, of course. And Captain Chin Lee (Pik Sen Lim) is the Master’s victim and tool, inexcusably disappearing in the second half of the story (when she should have been “earning redemption” – I use quotes because as a victim of the Master’s hypnosis she doesn’t really need to be redeemed – by participating in bringing the Master’s plan down. I’d suggest incorporating her into the Mike Yate role).

But I do have to disagree with the assertion that Jo is side-lined, which makes me wonder if Sandifer even watched the serial. Katy Manning is magnificent here: generous to Pertwee in their scenes together, and really seizing control when on her own. She single-handedly ends the first prison riot. And she’s the person who shows most resistance to the Mind Parasite, aside from Barnham whose “accident” has somehow rendered him immune.


The monster does get bigger over the story, so the implication is at least there that it does somehow “feed” off its victims. Somehow.

(Though it’s also possible it actually eats electricity – initially from its “control” box and later from the Doctor’s attempt to keep it contained – and just uses its mind powers to murder people.)

Equally, it grows most significantly after its encounters with the two Time Lords, so it may be that it is absorbing knowledge – certainly it doesn’t start teleporting until after rummaging about in the crania of the only two people who might know the secret of space/time travel, so it does appear to be learning something from the folks it messes with – so it may get either sustenance or the ability to sustain itself from the Doctor or the Master’s mind.

But whatever it’s eating it’s not “evil”. If anything, it’s fear.

The Doctor himself admits that he cannot resist the machine – that, in a neat foreshadowing of “Planet of Spiders”, he cannot face his fears. The insight into his greatest fear: the destruction of an alternate Earth that he witnessed in “Inferno” is also nice continuity (and one I’d have liked to see reflected again in “...Spiders” by having the Great One’s cave of crystal be a cave of fire). And in the colour-restored version, we can now see that there are more flames flickering over the infamous “monster parade” from the Part Three cliff-hanger.

So the message of the story – far from being one of original sin – is that the more fearful you are, the more you are likely to be killed by your fears: whether you’re an American Senator whose no-doubt guilty conscience means he goes down like nine-pins where Fu Peng stands up better to the psychic attack, or the vicious gang-leader Mailer (whose “fears” get him in the end by the poetic justice of being shot by the Brig just in the nick). William Marlowe (does that make Delgado Faust?) is terrific as Mailer, easily locking horns with the Master in order to achieve his own agenda, like a kind of anti-Brigadier to the Master’s anti-Doctor (something which makes his end all the more apt).

Barnham’s lobotomised condition renders him without fear (not without “evil”) and so he is immune. And Jo is shown as essentially braver than the Doctor here, as though she has learned and grown following her experience in “Terror of the Autons” – I like to think this is a first step on her path towards resisting the Master in “Frontier in Space” (and again, I should have liked to see Chin Lee leading the way by standing up to the Master here).

It is fear that makes good people think they are justified in doing bad things (like lobotomising prisoners to stop them being violent or anti-social); fear, as it were, is the mind killer, the real mind of evil here.



I have to say that the DVD release comes with my highest recommendation. The traditional fan reading that “Mind of Evil” is “better” in black and white almost certainly doesn’t stand up to seeing the beautifully restored colour – in particular Episode One, thanks to the enormous hard work of Stuart “Babelcolour” Humphryes in hand-colouring many, many key frames and Peter Crocker for computer-interpolating the rest to produce a genuinely astonishing result.

“The Mind of Evil” is not just a great story, but one where everyone involved – in the original production in 1970 and the restoration for the DVD in 2013 – have gone the extra mile to turn out a true classic.
A great way to complete the Pertwee Era’s DVD releases.

From the Amazon Media Room:

Amazon Publishing announced that it has secured a new Kindle Worlds license from RosettaBooks for the books of Kurt Vonnegut. Writers will soon be able to create and sell stories inspired by the iconic books of Kurt Vonnegut with Kindle Worlds’ self-service submission platform. The submission platform for works under this license is expected to open in August. Kindle Worlds is the first commercial publishing platform that enables any writer to write stories based on a range of original works and characters and earn royalties for doing so.

. . . .

“Since the launch of Kindle Worlds a month ago, we’ve published over 120 stories and the customer response has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Philip Patrick, Director, Business Development and Publisher of Kindle Worlds. “To include the work of an American literary icon in Kindle Worlds is a thrill for us and a golden opportunity for Vonnegut fans everywhere.”

“We have been very pleased with the success of the Kurt Vonnegut backlist on Kindle,” said Donald C. Farber, trustee of the Kurt Vonnegut Trust. “With Kindle Worlds we have an opportunity to further his reach with today’s readers. This is a natural extension of his legacy and a testament to the enduring popularity of his characters and stories. Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time, is going to quickly become a Kindle Worlds favorite.”

Link to the rest at Amazon Media Room

Click to Tweet/Email/Share This Post

Let us be frank. Russia has not just overnight turned into a monstrously evil state. It has been that way for a long time. Though they are understandable, calls to boycott Russian goods and next year's Winter Olympics over LGBT rights abuses can seem somewhat selfish and hollow when you consider what else Russia has been up to.

Press freedom has been severely curtailed for years, perhaps it never stopped after the end of the Soviet Union. Though Reporters Without Borders expressed concern over Russia's own Great Firewall of Cameron, we aren't just talking about some censorship here and there. The list of journalists killed throughout the Russian Federation is absolutely terrifying. The abject failure of Russian authorities to take the problem seriously speaks volumes about their dedication to free speech. (That is without speculating over who may be behind the murders of reporters....). The effect on the rest of the press has been chilling.

In the run up to the Olympics forced evictions and migrant worker abuses have given more than enough food for thought for those contemplating a boycott. And if you think those are "serious" enough, then take a look at how Russia has been conducting it's wars in and around Chechnya (although don't think I'm siding with the other side there, a pox on both their houses).

And these abuses aren't just left in Russia. Just look at what happened to Alexander Litvinenko in London.

Russia has been squeezing her people ever since it emerged from the Soviet Union 20 odd years ago. And that grip is getting tighter and tighter. The abuses of LGBT people by both the Government and civilians are horrendous. But they are just one facet of the evils being committed there by the Government, on behalf of the Government and backed by powerful special interests in both business and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Don't just stand up for the LGBT people of Russia. Spread the word of the crimes against all the Russian people. But I don't think a boycott of vodka and/or the Olympics is quite enough to get the message over to the Russian Government.

Readers in the US can now buy eBooks of seven of my earlier works, for $2.99 each.

"Your papers, please."

I'm not sure what's more enraging—the casual racial profiling or the presumption of guilty-until-proven-innocent—but it's getting hard to deny that the racists are in the driving seat of policy at the Home Office these days.

The racism is utterly, dismally, predictable when times are bad—frightened, stressed people with no economic security look around for someone to blame, and they can be very easily manipulated into blaming others. It's important also to remember that the 1930s were populated by people coming to terms with rapid technological change-induced future shock, and looking for certainty in the face of the future. Today, we have similar levels of future shock, largely social in nature: thanks to the internet we can't ignore other people whose views we find repugnant.

But racism isn't the key issue here. The real question we should be asking is not "what" but "why".

I have a new speculative hypothesis to stand alongside the Martian invasion and the bad dream. It is this: the over-arching reason for the clamp-down on dissent, migration, and freedom of expression, and the concurrent emphasis on security in the developed world, constitutes the visible expression of a pre-emptive counter-revolution.

The fuse for a revolution was lit by the global financial crisis of 2007/08, in a process that looked alarmingly close to triggering the Crisis of Capitalism (a hypothesized event which is associated with an ideology to which the current political elite of the USA and EU are for the most part highly allergic, for anyone aged over 50 spent their formative years under the bipolar tension of the Cold War). It sputtered briefly in the west in the form of the Occupy and related movements, but truly caught fire in 2009 with the failed Green revolution and in 2010-11 with the Arab spring—which were inflamed by the spike in global food prices caused by capital fleeing into commodities in the wake of the banking crisis. Meanwhile, the imposition of disaster capitalism in the west (as a purported "solution" to the debt-based spending bubbles various western governments embarked on during the boom years of the 1990s-2007) inflamed popular tensions in those countries, with results like this (undirected rioting) that never adhered to any political direction, but nevertheless terrified the ruling elite, leading to their retaliation via draconian punishments.

The wave of revolutions has so far been contained within the Arab world (a part of the globe which—I don't think this is any kind of coincidence at all—is suddenly becoming much less important to the energy geopolitics of the west, with the switch to fracking and renewables now under way). The policy of pre-emptive counter-revolution, facilitated by the imposition of the global internet panopticon, has clamped the lid down tight.

So, in summary: I believe what we're seeing is a move towards the global imposition of a police state in the developed world, leveraging the xenophobia that naturally emerges during insecure times, by a ruling elite who are themselves feeling threatened by a spectre. Controls on movement, freedom of association, and speech are all key tools in the classic police state's arsenal. What's new about this cycle is that the police state machinery is imposed locally, within national boundaries, but applies everywhere: the economic system it is intended to protect is transnational and unconstrained. Which is why even places that were largely exempt during the cold war are having a common police state agenda quietly imposed. There is to be no refuge, other than destabilized "failed states" where the conditions of life make a police state look utopian in comparison.

This system has emerged organically, from the bottom up, and is not the result of any conspiracy; it's just individuals and groups moving to protect their shareholdings in the Martian invaders, by creating an environment that is safe for the hive intelligences to operate in.

As to how I feel about this ...

I'm middle-aged and comfortable and have no great love for revolutions, even though I'd say that the imposition of a global police state deserves a place high on the list of complaints weighty enough to legitimize one. But revolutions almost invariably go bad. A few, like the Velvet revolution, turn out all right in the end; but many more provide opportunities for the vilest dregs of humanity to run amok. Only when the post-revolutionary society stabilizes and the convulsions subside do we get to see whether or not we're better off: and even if we are, that's scant comfort for the bereaved relatives of those who died in the process. As I said, I'm middle-aged, fat, and have health issues: don't look for me on the barricades. If it happens, I'll be over here wringing my hands and writing communiques calling for less smashing of skulls. Because? Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

Thursday:

The good news is that there has been a small but significant increase in Great Britain’s output in the second quarter, meaning that there will be call for more of the new tenners when they come in.

Unemployment remains at almost exactly the same place it was when the Coalition entered government, and inflation has been at about 3% for the last year (a bit too high, but – crash of 2009 aside – lower than it’s been since before Mr Frown was Prime Monster).

We’re even a little HAPPIER than we were last year!

And in a reversal of a trend that’s lasted nearly thirty years, income inequality has got LESS under the Coalition: average household incomes have dropped since the economy went to pieces under the last government, but the largest fall has been for the richest 20%, while the least well off 20% has actually seen an INCREASE in average income after tax and benefits, as a direct result of LIBERAL DEMOCRAT policies such as targeting tax cuts at basic rate taxpayers and expecting the well off to pay a proper rate of capital gains tax.

Clearly, as Liberal Democrat Voice reports, Liberal Democrats in government do better than Hard “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” Labour.

And, as a reminder to those people calling for the return of a “punish the rich” 50p tax rate, it seems that asking the better off to pay a range of FAIR taxes raises MORE money which means that we can CUT LESS or TAX LESS. Mr Neil puts it well in his letter to the paper here.

If you want to “clamp down on tax avoiders” you don’t do it by hitting the people who DO pay for an extra 5%; a LOWER tax rate seems to mean FEWER avoiders too. And call me a practical old lump but I’d rather have 45% of something than 50% of nothing, because I put REDUCING the burden of tax and cuts on the least well off AHEAD of the dogmatic pleasures of stiffing the rich for 50p.

As with the earlier news that Hard Labour’s recession was deeper than thought while the Coalition’s “double dip” never happened this was NOT headline news, because it was not a DISASTER.


Welcoming the news, Shadow Chancer Mr Bully Balls was spitting teeth.

Friday

You have, presumably, heard how one of Britain’s biggest landowners is to use its enormous capital reserves to try and bankrupt a recent successful start-up company.

Although you MIGHT have heard that reported as: “Church of England to force Wonga out of business”.

This initiative from everyone’s favourite establishment theocracy comes after the Government announced that the monthly interest that credit unions can charge will increase from 2% to 3%. That’s an increase of 26.8% APR to 42.6% APR.

So it looks like the Church only got interested when credit unions went from being CHARITABLE loans to PROFITABLE ones.

Is it necessarily a BAD thing that the Church might bankrupt Wonga? Mr Dr Vince doesn’t seem to think so. Competition is, after all, supposed to be HEALTHY and – we’re told – result in a BETTER outcome (in this case lower interest rates) for the consumer.

But I’m concerned.

Firstly, Wonga charges such high interest rates because they accept a high degree of RISK in the people that they lend to. Will the CofE be willing to sustain very high levels of losses, or will they be offering loans only to much safer borrowers? Will they, in fact, not be competing with Wonga at all, but rather with existing credit unions?

Secondly, is the problem of debt not that people are getting into more debt than they can afford? Offering them CHEAPER loans will encourage MORE borrowing, people who might have been DISCOURAGED by Wonga’s high interest rates might be encouraged to take out borrowing with a lower “Church” rate. Cheap lending, after all, is what fuelled the BOOM that led to the BUST of the Mr Frown years.

But, perhaps more importantly, I’m worried about setting a precedent of letting a religious organisation – ostensibly one with the power of the state behind it, too – decide to eliminate a legitimate, legal, if slightly odious business on ostensibly dogmatic grounds. Would we be as sanguine if the Church said it was going to use its property portfolio to start blocking planning applications for HS2? Or that they were to begin buying up buildings used for “immoral purposes” (whatever the Church decided that might mean) in order to put a stop to that?

Or it could all turn into an incompetent mess...

To move the story completely into “you couldn’t make it up” territory, within 24 hours the newly created Arch-Banker of Canterbury, Mr Justin Wibbly, had to admit to EMBARRASSMENT when it turned out that the Church is in fact an investor in Wonga.

Perhaps the DAILY MASH covers this best: “Bible story of Jesus and the moneylenders is still on his ‘to-do’ list.”

If you think about it, it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.

Nuclear bombs emit gamma radiation anyway. There’s nothing special about that.

And the gamma bomb has never been shown to function as a neutron bomb does: does not preserve infrastructure while killing people, so it can’t be that…

And anyway what good is it to have a bomb that just puts out shitloads of gamma radiation? What’s the purpose of that? How is that militarily useful?

And why oh WHY is the one-and-only “secret formula” to building a gamma bomb sitting in Banner’s residence taped to the underside of a chair or something? Atomic bomb projects in the Cold War were many things, but “solo projects” weren’t one of them…poor old Igor should not have had to ransack Banner’s place to find his big secret; he should’ve been able to find out all he needed to know just by being a top scientist on the project for a number of years, right?

And why on EARTH does Igor fail to stop the countdown when Banner goes running out onto the test grounds to save Rick Jones? Doesn’t Igor still need Banner alive, if he wants to winkle out the gamma-bomb secret? Isn’t this what Igor’s been sent there to do? For that matter, why is it possible for Igor to simply refrain from halting the countdown? Would you organize your top-secret military installation so that there’s just one button in a room with one guy that can abort the nuclear test? Where are all the other people? Why doesn’t Banner halt the countdown himself? Why doesn’t anyone freak out when they see a man running out into the test grounds? What in heaven’s name is wrong with these people?

It doesn’t really need explaining, Bloggers; it’s just comics, after all.

But here’s my take on it regardless.

We begin with Igor. You know, for a spy he’s got a pretty shit cover, wouldn’t you say? “Hi, my name’s Igor, please let me into your top-secret nuclear facility during the height of Red paranoia.” But then if you think about it for a minute or two, it seems that Igor must not be your typical “spy”, right? Assistant to Bruce Banner is a reasonably elevated position, after all…because here is a guy who apparently got snapped up by the Army straight out of college: no published papers after his Ph.D thesis, no patent applications, living on isolated bases out in the desert, with a limitless supply of money and material to be a super-genius with, but no penthouse apartments and no Nobel Prizes. Have you seen the stuff Banner started making after he became the Hulk, by the way? It’s, uh…

Pretty weird!

And there are not exactly a ton of people in white coats poring all over it. I don’t even think Ross allows tours of the Banner Archive anymore, do you? Last time he did, we got the Abomination out of it. So no wonder that the only guy he lets monkey around with the machines in there is a dude whose training is in psychiatry! It’s probably just too dangerous to let anyone with a degree in physics or engineering so much as take a look at. All Banner’s stuff does is alter human biology in a really scary and totally unpredictable way, if you use it wrong…and no one knows how to use it right. Plus, it’s all definitely 100% lock-stock-and-barrel Property of the U.S. Army…oh, what’s that, SHIELD Director, you’d like to get some Bannertech for your fancy new helicarrier? That’s nice. I hear Tony Stark’s listed in the phone book and Who’s Who. Oh! And apparently Reed Richards — you’ve heard of him — lives in the middle of Manhattan, with an address and a doorman and an appointment book and everything.  You should call him up, I think you two have a lot in common. Well, ‘bye now. Have fun dealing with those wonderful ethical scientists of yours, y’hear? AND WE NEVER HAD THIS CONVERSATION, YOU’VE NEVER HEARD THE NAME “BRUCE BANNER”, IS THAT CLEAR.

Plus…

Banner is still on the payroll, isn’t he? Whenever he’s not the Hulk, he goes right back to his lab, making more freaked-out body-horror machines for Uncle Sam. Hey: even after all this time, Banner’s still an Army man! They bought him, and he’s gonna stay bought!

So why would they turn his work over to other people?

When that doubtless was not the deal. Let’s think about Igor for a minute; why is he there? Does General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross seem to you like the sort of guy who would allow a Russkie onto his top-secret Cold War base? Yet Igor is with Banner, and perhaps that makes the difference: the Army has one supergenius who’s all their own, that they don’t have to share, so you can imagine they try pretty hard to keep him happy. Hmm, I wonder what Banner’s Ph.D thesis was on, you know?

I wonder where he met Igor?

Let’s say it was when he was still in school. Maybe Igor was a fellow student. Maybe he was a visiting professor. And maybe Igor saw some of Banner’s work and realized this kid was onto something potentially earthshaking. Maybe he tried to take him under his wing, or otherwise befriend him. Maybe these were his orders. And maybe he thought he was succeeding. maybe they developed a good working relationship. Maybe Igor thought he and Banner really were gradually becoming friends.

But Banner doesn’t have friends.

Consider Banner the “milksop”: why does Ross put up with him? Because he has to. Why does Banner make Ross so apoplectic with rage? Because Banner is the most passive-aggressive little fucker you’ve ever met in your life, and Ross can’t win against him even one time. “A damn Russkie, on my base?!” “I’m sorry, General, but…that’s just the way I want it, you see. I have to be allowed to do my work.” Ross wants to fight, but Banner barely even sees the need to tell him he doesn’t have the time. Banner is King Shit around here, and everybody simply has to do what he says. A big control room full of people? No, General…I don’t think we’ll have that. I can handle it all just fine by myself from this console. Thanks for stopping by, I’m happy to take time away from my valuable work to keep you informed about how best to assist me. However, in the future perhaps it’d be more efficient if I just sent you a memo telling you how things are going to be? And you can even sign it, if you like.

Why does Betty Ross like Bruce Banner?

Because he can mess up her father without breaking a sweat. He can tie him in knots while cleaning his glasses, without so much as raising his voice. Ross is right about Banner, folks, you know what I mean? And his daughter’s just as right. And as for Igor…

Well, call it Stockholm Syndrome in reverse. Igor is spending all this time trying to crack Banner’s icy exterior, and nothing works. He bakes him a birthday cake. Banner leaves it on the table and says “well, it’s getting late, perhaps you’d better get your coat.” He offers help with calculations. Banner reluctantly gives him the ones an undergrad could do. He fetches coffee. He picks up dry-cleaning. He’s a world-class scientist in his own right, and he’s picking up dry-cleaning, and he’s the closest thing Banner has to a friend and he’s busting his ass trying to get close to him, and every time he thinks he’s making progress Banner says something or does something that shows he’s just a cold fucking bastard who can’t be reached. Igor’s getting so frustrated that he isn’t even following orders anymore, God help him he’s gotten to the point where he’s actually desperate for Banner to like him, and he just can’t make it happen no matter what he does. Because Banner is cold. Banner is dry. Banner isn’t human, he’s a robot or something! A robot designed only for extreme passive-aggresssive fucking-with-people. You walk into a room with that guy, and it’s like being in airless space, freezing to death. When Banner is in a room with you, there are fewer people in the room than there would be if you were there by yourself. Social relationships bend into uncomfortable shapes under the force of Banner’s antisocial gravity. No one can say anything right. Everything’s a disaster. And Banner doesn’t care.

Why didn’t Banner halt the countdown himself?

Because Igor is his flunky. Banner doesn’t push buttons; that’s what Igor is for.

So why doesn’t Igor halt the countdown?

You know, he should. He really should. His superiors would want him to; in fact they would threaten him with the most dire punishment for not doing so. And maybe tomorrow Banner will crack. Maybe he’ll ask for advice about the General’s daughter. Igor really thought maybe that was a break in the clouds, you know? Banner would be so hopeless at a romantic relationship, that for once he really would need Igor’s help…and then the shoe would be on the other foot. Igor could make Banner dependent on him, for advice about the lovely young Miss Ross. Where else, after all, could Banner go?

But it didn’t happen. Banner screwed up with Betty constantly, and the doe-eyed dimwit didn’t notice, didn’t care, why it actually seemed only to increase her ardour for this coldest of all possible cold fish. How could Banner get so lucky? Why wasn’t anything hard for him, why did he never get his comeuppance? Why didn’t he ever, not once, turn to Igor? Yet…there was always the possibility that tomorrow would see a breakthrough…some chink in Banner’s emotional armour simply had to appear eventually…and in many senses it was still an ideal set-up, Banner kept everything but everything about the gamma bomb project so compartmentalized that Igor was actually a hundred miles ahead of any other person who would possibly want to know how to build a gamma bomb, just by virtue of being almost close…

Almost close…

So, there was always tomorrow, wasn’t there?

For his mission?

And yet…

In his heart, Igor knew that tomorrow would be the same as today, which was already the same as yesterday only worse. As all these days were. Knowing the man, one knew that there was no imaginable tomorrow on which Banner would suddenly become a person it was possible to make progress with, or even around. How many times had Igor dreamed of just running away in the night, leaving Banner behind him forever, getting revenge by having a good life, enjoying the treasure of simple daily experience that Banner valued so little it seemed he couldn’t even perceive it? Igor could go somewhere tropical and luxuriate by the sea. Get drunk with new friends, gamble and win at the roulette wheel to their excited cheers, so much backslapping that the space between his shoulderblades became sore with it. He could meet a girl, too: spend long languid evenings on the beach with her, talking of the stars in the sky. She would look at him with those same stars reflected in a deep, black, peaceful gaze…he could tell her of the work he once did, the life he once had, and she would understand. As porpoises leapt in the darkness beyond the reef, he would move closer to her, their two shadows becoming one on the silver moonlit sands…and he would send Banner a picture from their wedding, with no note.

Or.

He would not push the button.

Banner would not have told him to push the button. Better: Banner would have told him most definitely not to push the button. Everybody knew what Banner was like.

Banner was the only reason he was here. Anyone else, Ross would’ve overridden: “a Russkie, on my base?” And quite rightly, too:  Igor might as well have showed up at the gates wearing a T-shirt saying “Hello My Name Is Russian Spy.”  Banner was the only reason, he was the only reason, that Igor was here. And Banner was the reason, the only reason…

…That he couldn’t get away.

And so the button doesn’t get pushed. And Banner stops living. And Igor is free.

Or, no…

Wait.

That isn’t what happens.

That isn’t what happens at all. Somehow Banner survives. For the love of all that’s holy, why does nothing ever happen to this man? Well, Igor will have a lot of time in Leavenworth to think about it, I guess…but from our more exalted perspective, we can see that he’s actually missed something important. Because somehow Banner does crack on that day, doesn’t he? Out onto the test grounds he runs, to rescue Rick Jones. Why does he do it?

What’s changed in him?

We’ll probably never know; one second later, the surface of the Sun touches down on the flats, and he’s changed again, and can never go back. Igor should’ve waited. But Igor just couldn’t wait anymore, don’t you see? And at least…at least…

The Americans don’t have the gamma bomb.

Whatever a “gamma bomb” is, and maybe only Igor could have told us, for years upon years. Banner, of course, never touched the Bomb again…perhaps he received an insight, on that day, that told him there was more to his research than anyone had yet imagined? Today in the Marvel Universe, apparently the U.S. Government stockpiles gamma bombs in tiny little towns in the Unfortunate States…but you know, I find it a bit hard to believe this. I don’t believe this. Because no one has yet managed to explain to me just what a gamma bomb is…

So let me tell you what I think it is.

It’s a nuclear bomb, that doesn’t require nuclear fuel.

A strange idea, eh?

But it fits the facts well enough, I think…and it goes a long way to supplying a rationale for Banner’s employment by the Army. Well, would anyone else look on a theory of nuclear reactions without nuclear fuel — not even hydrogen! — as anything other than a big hole in the ocean to pour money into? But to the U.S. Army, at the height of the Cold War, even the chance of making a bomb without uranium would be worth any investment. I must confess that Warren Ellis’ Planetary comes to mind, here…the bomb, you see, isn’t really a “bomb” at all. More like a lattice: an array. A bunch of copper and platinum, twisted in a way just so, that when the right thing is done to it at the right time something happens to spacetime. Perhaps it gets “pinched”, or “squeezed”? I read someplace that the word “zillion” is just a generic term for “any number greater than a centillion” — which is pretty cool, isn’t it? — and “gamma” is the same sort of thing, really: “any frequency higher than that of an X-ray”. So there’s no real “top” to the range of “gamma”, unless it is one set by the structure of spacetime itself…

And there probably is such a “top” to that range, actually, but this is comics so why don’t we say that the gamma bomb exceeds that energetic limit anyway? Yes: a pulse of gamma radiation — just gamma radiation, just light! — so intense that it runs over its own physical limits and creates an actual physical shockwave. Creates heat, creates sound, creates a mushroom cloud, creates all these waste products we associate with an uncontrolled fission or fusion reaction! But there’s really nothing “nuclear” about it, at least not in the primary stage: it’s just an electromagnetic event.

So…you know what the Army likes about this?

You could mass-produce it. Out of a few tons of copper and platinum. No uranium mines, no Livermore lab required! You wouldn’t even need radiation suits to work on it! All you’d need is a blueprint. And it isn’t just about bombs, or at least the device’s potential is greater than bombs, because think of all the things we use radioactive materials for in our world, that we could make easier and cheaper with a Bannertech substitute! Though naturally there are national security issues here: if all you needed to make a bomb was a blueprint, then one thing you could never do is let people get their hands on that blueprint…

But of course, there isn’t a blueprint. What Banner was doing is something no one understood at the time: building a giant thing the size of an apartment building according to some really specific plan he extracted from a technical elaboration of a theory he never revealed to anyone. In his Ph.D thesis, what the Army and Igor both noticed, there’s a purely theoretical sketch of the wringing of “nuclear” power from empty space…but that’s all there is, and all there ought to ever have been. Behind the locked doors of the Banner Archive at Hulkbuster Base, watched over by Thunderbolt Ross on direct Presidential authority, there’s everything Banner made with the blueprint, but the blueprint’s now forever only in his head, and the stuff he’s making isn’t just “medical instrumentation that doesn’t require isotopes”, it’s a wholly new application of radiative emissions to tissues…and, I think it’s fair to say that none of it is finished? But no new gamma bombs are even started, in there, so as much as mass-produced “gamma bombs” could’ve enabled them to win the arms race at a canter, it’s hard to see how the Army could’ve made any…I mean, if they didn’t have a blueprint, they would at least had to’ve had a model…a prototype?

Well…

There is one of those, actually. Though where it is I couldn’t tell you…but I know who it was made by. For there was another interested reader of the famous Ph.D thesis named Eliot Franklin, who went on to earn both his Ph.D and his nickname (“the black Bruce Banner”) by showing how to take Banner’s by-now-known-of apartment-block-sized gamma bomb array, and reduce it to the size of a canteloupe. But clever Dr. Franklin, reconstructing the gamma bomb without the aid of any blueprint and without even access to Banner’s own developed theory — just what was in the thesis! — is not an Army man, and he damn well was going to have the penthouse and the patents…

Though it must be said: he was probably taking his life in his hands by trying it. Dude, really, you’re going to patent the design for a handheld nuclear bomb anyone can make with parts from Radio Shack? Do you really want the Patent Office having that kind of geopolitical power? Somewhere a particularly shady branch of the CIA was coming up with rather messy contingency plans, before Dr. Franklin had so much as adjusted his tassel…

But it didn’t happen, because Richmond Enterprises stepped in, and we could theorize to an interesting extent about just what was going on there exactly…but we won’t, because all I really mean to show is that: if the gamma bomb uses nuclear material, then Dr. Franklin’s miniaturization of it doesn’t really make any sense, and boy oh boy would it be dangerous to handle if it did. So, perhaps this speaks to the plausibility of my little theory about it?

PERHAPS!

But I still don’t believe that the U.S. government mass-produced gamma bombs, even if they did get their hands on Franklin’s prototype (or what was left of it once Bruce Banner got done messing with it)…and you know why?

Because Franklin’s prototype came fifteen years too late (forty years, if you believe the Sliding Timescale) — by the time they had it in hand, the Arms Race could no longer be won, you see? If it ever could have been in the first place. Mass-produced bombs, well that’s just dandy, but once you have enough bombs to kill everyone on Earth ten times over, you might think of making new bombs but would there be much point in making hundreds of thousands of them?

At that point, the absurdity approaches Catch-22 levels. How could you even maintain your commitment to the arms race at all, if your next logical step is to increase the number of nuclear bombs by a thousandfold, like in a single calendar year? You couldn’t. That’d be crazy. Even the Army’s not that crazy! So you wouldn’t do it. You just wouldn’t.

You wouldn’t…

…

…Although, if you did, and obviously you wouldn’t but if you did, and if before someone stopped you and tore the lettuce off your epaulets you had made, I dunno, like a run of twenty thousand bombs or something…then the logical thing to do would be to smash them all, but if they’d cost money to make, then the money would need accounting for, so…

…Maybe the Army would be crazy enough to save them?

So I take it back: I guess I do believe there’s some stockpiling that went on.

But hopefully all those bombs are nice and exploded now. Well, if you think about it…

I guess the Leader doesn’t want anybody going hog-wild with Bannertech either?

So he and Ross are on the same page on that one, probably.

And now if you will excuse me, Bloggers, for some reason I am suddenly keenly conscious of the fact that I may have mislaid my life around here somewhere. Oh, for Christ’s sake where is it…

I am always putting it down and then forgetting where I left it!

Maybe I left it outside…

Yes, I’ll check there.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis told reporters, speaking in Italian but using the English word “gay.”

That’s a bit suprising.

Let’s start with just those last five words, which may be the biggest departure in tone from his predecessor. “Who am I to judge?” wasn’t something we heard much, if ever, from Benedict XVI — a guy who seemed to enjoy heading up the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the “Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition,” really) and then changed his name so that it included the word “edict.”

“Who am I to judge?” seems like a pretty un-pope-like thing to say. Francis, after all, was literally enthroned by his denomination as the final arbiter of all matters apostolic. He was given a hat, a scepter and a ring all symbolizing that judging is pretty much his job description. But one of the things it’s hard not to like about Francis is that he doesn’t seem overly impressed with hats, scepters, rings and thrones — and even less so now that he’s the one wearing them and sitting on them.

“Who am I to judge?” is, taken by itself, good Baptist theology, so I have to applaud that part.

This also creates a happily awkward situation for the bishops over whom Francis is bishop. Many of them — particularly here in America  – seem enormously impressed with hats and throne and scepters. “Who am I to judge?” is not a question one expects to hear from them, except maybe in order to quickly answer it themselves: “I’m the bishop, that’s who — so you’d better listen.”

Now that the pope himself has given this question his blessing, it would be nice to see it redirected toward some of those bishops. “Cardinal Dolan, who are you to judge?”

Based on some of Francis’ other recent comments, I’m not sure this subversive effect is wholly unintentional. The pope’s comments above, after all, were made on his way home from World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, where his message to political leaders was “dialogue, dialogue, dialogue” and his message to tens of thousands of young people was a commission to “make a mess” in their dioceses.

Actually, according to Mary Hunt, his invitation to those young people was to become troublemakers:

On July 25, in a rousing speech to young people, he stated: “quiero lío en las diócesis,” which the English language press prissily translated as a plea for the youth to “make a mess.” I suspect that those more familiar with the Argentine way of speaking would have rendered it “go ahead and ‘screw up,’” though that is a bit unseemly for a pontiff. What Francis appears to have meant is that he wants young people to shake things up in their local situations as they manifest their faith.

Sara Benincasa’s take isn’t as hyperbolic as it seems: “New Pope Wants Kids Wilding in the Streets,” says the jokey Wonkette headline. But it’s only half-jokey. “A young person who does not protest, I do not like,” Francis said in Rio.

I’m with him on that bit, too, although I also agree with Hunt when she says of such protests and mess-making: “Whether the institutional church will permit much of it remains to be seen.”

Francis also had some good things to say about poverty and the environment, but the biggest media splash surrounded the comment at the top of this post. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” is where most of the reaction is focused.

That initial big splash came from the idea that this comment indicated some kind of big change in Catholic teaching or practice regarding LGBT people. Here I’ll take what will probably be my one and only opportunity to agree with both Fr. Geoff Farrow and Al Mohler who both note — one with dismay and the other with delight — that Francis’ remarks leave the teaching of the Catechism unchanged and unchallenged.

Father Farrow’s response is worth reading in full:

“If someone is gay…” Substitute the word “straight” for “gay” and you begin to see the problem; in fact, whenever an issue arises regarding gender orientation, simply do that: Substitute the word “straight” for “gay.” Does the statement still make sense?

Farrow has, for many years, been making a mess and protesting, and that hasn’t gone over very well with the bishops or with Francis’ predecessors, so he’s not inclined to give the new pope partial credit for at least changing the tone of his remarks. Changing the tone without changing the substance, Farrow says, “is a way of appearing to change everything without changing anything.”

He’s got a point. A change in tone without any change in substance is, well, insubstantial.

But perhaps it’s not completely insubstantial. The substance of Catholic teaching and Catholic behavior toward LGBT people needs to change. But the tone needed to change too. It matters less, but it still matters, that Francis spoke of someone who “is gay,” rather than of someone who is “homosexual” or who is “intrinsically disordered.” It is, at least, a step back from the silly authoritarian semantic games in which church leaders claim the right to define others as othered. Accepting the language that others use for themselves is a tiny step in the direction of coming to terms.

But, yes, still a relatively insubstantial step. It might mean something, I suppose, if the folks from Westboro Baptist started waving signs that read “God Hates LGBTQI People,” instead of what their infamous signs usually say now. That would be an improvement of sorts, but still a far cry from good.

So my response to this comment is much like Grandmere Mimi’s, “I don’t see the pope offering hope for any change in practice. The pope’s tone is more pastoral than previous popes, but that’s about it.” She also links to a Daily Mash bit that flips the script nicely:

What should the Liberal Democrats do if they hold the balance of power at the next general election?

The answer is that we shall probably have no choice.

The first reason is that the experience of coalition in this parliament may, rightly or wrongly, lead whichever is the largest of the parties - Labour or Conservative - to decide to govern as a minority and try their luck at another general election soon. We could even force this decision on them by refusing to form a coalition, but we Lib Dems are supposed to believe in coalition and would find the prospect a second election more frightening than either of the main parties.

The second reason is that it is unlikely that we shall be able to command a majority when combined with each of the other two parties after the next election.

After the 2010 election there were those who wanted a Labour/Lib Dem/SNP/Green coalition to be put together. This seemed inherently unstable to me - Alex Salmond would have asked for another billion for Scotland every second month and Sinn Fein would have held the balance of power in the Commons if its members decide to turn up - but even if it was the outcome you wanted the numbers were not quite there.

And it may well be the case after the next election that there is only one coalition (assuming Labour and the Tories do not get together - and they do have much in common) that can be put together. So the decision as to whether to govern with Labour or the Tories after 2015 may well be taken out of our hands by the voters even if the collapse of Lib Dem representation that many forecast fails to materialise - and I suspect it will fail.

Once you have more than two parties of any size under first past the post, election results become something of a lottery. We are not in government today because of Nick Clegg's masterly leadership - we lost seats and votes at the last election - but because of the way the votes for the other parties fell. Being lucky is an immensely useful quality in a leader, but it is best not to mistake it for strategic genius.

Stephen Tall makes some related points in his latest column for Conservative Home: "We Lib Dems haven't chosen our strategy. The voters have chosen it for us."

Steve Benen notes an interesting thing about Obamacare…

The pattern isn’t exactly subtle: if you live in a state where officials want "Obamacare" to work, the law looks great. If you live in a state where officials are actively trying to undermine the law, regardless of what it does to you, your premiums, and your family’s access to quality and affordable care, then — you guessed it — the news isn’t as encouraging.

Makes you wonder how many Americans are going to suffer or maybe die without insurance…or pay more for the insurance they do buy…because some people just want don’t want their political opponents’ plan to actually help people. Read the whole piece.

LibDemVoice is running a daily feature, ‘Lessons of Coalition’, to assess the major do’s and don’ts learned from our experience of the first 3 years in government. Reader contributions are welcome, either as comments or posts. The word limit is no more than 450 words, and please focus on just one lesson you think the party needs to learn. Simply email your submission to voice@libdemvoice.org. Today Mark Valladares shares his thoughts …

Better party communications responding to the realities of governing

My lesson of coalition is the importance of building a Party communication system that can respond effectively to the external factors of government.

On policy, a strategy of forming policy working groups does not easily allow a Party response to emerging issues, be they driven by the media, by your Coalition partner or by unexpected world events. As a result, in the vacuum created, our Ministers are too often obliged to think on their feet or allowed to ‘freelance’. Most of the major clashes between the Party in government and the Party at large have stemmed from such events, and whilst improved communication allows Ministers and senior Party figures to explain afterwards, unless they are perceived to have got it right first time, disillusionment amongst a dwindling activist and member base is certain. We need policy documents that express fundamental principles and goals whilst leaving the small print for background material – the how and the when, if you like.

We need to continue to find new ways of informing our members and, even more importantly, inviting ongoing participation from members and activists. There is an astonishing amount of knowledge, experience and expertise out there, and we will be stronger for tapping it – it will give our Ministers and spokespeople a clear, early steer on what we are thinking as a tribe. We do need to express our fundamental principles more clearly. We are Liberal Democrats, not Centre Democrats or Equidistant Democrats, and we are at our best when we espouse liberal values. At a time when the public are yearning for someone who speaks to them and for them, there is space in British politics for someone who believes in things, and we shouldn’t be afraid to do so.

* Mark Valladares blogs at The View from Creeting St Peter.

Previously published:

Stephen Tall: Stronger policy development and campaigning on issues that matter to the public (AKA where’s our liberal equivalent of the benefits cap?)

Look how the industry has declined

How the circulations of national newspapers have declined since GE2010 See table pic.twitter.com/4FTguIS1Ld

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) July 31, 2013

The ground war is going to matter much more than the air war

We spend a lot of time on PB trying to assess the impact of specific developments or stories on voting behaviour.

One factor that we should bear in mind is that the national media is in a sharp decline. For every five people that bought a daily national paper when the coalition was formed just four do so today and who knows what the above table will look like in May 2015.

Combine the falling sales with the rise of the pay wall and it’s not hard to conclude that the press is not going to be as influential as in previous times.

There’s another aspect to this: declining audiences for TV news.

Given the continued ban on TV election advertising, which I think is wrong, and the challenge facing the campaigns as they strive to get their messages over is enormous.

All this means in electioneering terms is that the ground game is going to be even more important. It becomes the prime way of getting your message across

But how are the parties with the it declining memberships going to resource that? Pushing envelopes through the doors of every residence in a 70,000+ voter constituency requires a lot of foot soldiers

Mike Smithson

As Dear Constant Readers know, I've an unhealthy obsession with less mainstream religions. Scientology is one which, though not mainstream, a great many people have at least heard of. So some of you may well know what a Suppressive Person (SP) is. For those that don't, here's the Church of Scientology's view:

"the Suppressive Person seeks to upset, continuously undermine, spread bad news about and denigrate betterment activities and groups. Thus the Anti-Social Personality is also against what Scientology is about—helping people become more able and improving conditions in society. As anyone can think of many examples of a Suppressive Person, this concept is not limited to Scientology. However, when such a person is connected to Scientology, for the good of the Church and the individuals in it, such a person is officially labeled a Suppressive Person so that others will know not to associate with them." Source: Scientology page "What does Suppressive Person mean?" 

Tory Christman, an SP but still a wonderful person, has a video of her experiences of getting an "SP Declare".

The Liberal Democrats have always prided themselves on their belief in the value of education. The question is, what do we mean by ‘education’?

Do we mean earnest and studious reading in the university library? Or do we mean something that promotes more free thinking and a genuine spirit of enquiry?

It is a question raised in the Spectator by Rory Sutherland of the advertising company Ogilvy, in an article titled Why I’m hiring graduates with thirds this year. It is one of the most life-affirming articles I have ever read:

It’s hard to tell the difference between a university and a business school nowadays. Where are all the hippies, the potheads and the commies? And why is everyone so intently serious and sober all the time? ‘Oh, it’s simple,’ a friend explained. ‘If you don’t get a 2:1 or a first nowadays, employers won’t look at your CV.’

So, as a keen game-theorist, I struck on an idea. Recruiting next year’s graduate intake for Ogilvy would be easy. We could simply place ads in student newspapers: ‘Headed for a 2:2 or a third? Finish your joint and come and work for us.’

Let me explain. I have asked around, and nobody has any evidence to suggest that, for any given university, recruits with first-class degrees turn into better employees than those with thirds (if anything the correlation operates in reverse). There are some specialised fields which may demand spectacular mathematical ability, say, but these are relatively few.

So my game theoretic instincts suggest that if we confine our recruitment efforts to people in the lower half of the degree ladder we shall have an exclusive appeal to a large body of people no less valuable than anyone else. And such people will be far more loyal hires, since we won’t be competing for their attention with deep-pocketed pimps in investment banking.

What Sutherland calls “this credentialist arms-race” is getting us nowhere. I think he’s on to something.

Oh, and me? I spent most of my time at university buggering about in student politics or in the union bar. Still got a 2:1, though. Damn, damn, damn...

A hole in our collective memory: copyright made mid-century books vanish.

I was trying to think through an aspect of writing that is generally instinctive to me, to try to figure out what, if anything about it could be taught. This resulted.

A given piece of writing has what I can only describe as a shape. It’s what we usually call style, but we ascribe that more to writers, and this is really on a piece-by-piece basis. Calling it structure almost works, but feels too detached and under the surface, whereas shape is tangible and visible to the reader. It’s ironically difficult to describe, because it is, ironically, a thing I experience in an almost synesthetic way. It’s the aspect of reading and writing that doesn’t feel like words, but instead sensual and physical. This is a difficult thing to describe.

Instead of describing, then, let’s ask how we choose the shape for a piece of writing. The step after having the idea, in other words, ideas being basically trivial things that one generally has too many of, not too few. You don’t actually mean “where do you get your ideas from," you mean “how did you get that idea to become a piece of art." And this is impossible to teach, because each shape is unique and you can’t really just stamp out identical copies of a given shape. Well, you can, but it’s very, very hard to do in a way that’s worth doing.

So let’s instead think of it as a bit of decision-making. That is, what sorts of thought processes might go into shape. A couple examples from my own work:

The Rose post had several competing concerns that defined what it had to be from the start. It had to be a “big" post in some fashion. As I approached it, it became obvious it was also part of a big period for the blog and my life, as my Kickstarter did far better than expected and was coinciding with the planned relaunch of my blog under a new name, and on top of that I’d very recently moved.

Eventually the phrase “initiation ritual" hit me - the idea that the Rose post should be an initiation for the new blog and the new series. The other thing that heavily influenced the post’s shape early on was thinking about the opening paragraph - the music/news paragraph. People ask why I do this sometimes, since the news rarely ties in very much with the subject of the article. The answer, ultimately, is to have a bit of structure - something I can reach for when I need something to ground a post. I wanted something beyond numbers to mark the time, and I figured popular music was good because it helped evoke the shape of a time. And news stories serve a similar purpose. It’s just a brief litany to conjure up the feel of right before the story aired.

But in this case, the news section ran into the problem that the obvious piece of news to include is, of course, Rose itself. And I realized that the only transition out of the news section was “Doctor Who has returned to television."

And the thing is, that’s actually a very good sentence. It’s not very structurally interesting, but it packs a lot of punch, especially two-and-a-half years into a blog about Doctor Who. And you don’t want to waste it right at the start of an essay like this. Which means I needed to not lead with the music/news. That’s OK - a structure like that is made to be broken sometimes. And the nature of the late wilderness years gave me a neat bit of cover - I could actually quietly drop that format for nearly a month before the Rose post so that nothing looked amiss when it started without that. So I could lull the reader into forgetting that it’s there - keep them focused on so many other things that they forget the basic bit of structure the blog has taught them over two-and-a-half years.

And so Rose ends up being structured as a continual resistance to that section. If it works correctly, and it surely does not always, the reader keeps wanting that line, “Doctor Who has returned to television," without knowing that’s the line they want. So you just write the entire piece as stalling for time until that line. It’s a shaggy dog story - you keep the reader hoping this is going to pay off somehow. The trick is to actually pay it all off, but actually, “Doctor Who has returned to television" is sufficient payoff. Or can be if you build to it right.

The other thing I wasn’t aware of when I wrote it, but realize now is that I wanted definitiveness. I knew once I got to the new series I’d have a larger audience, but less weight within that audience. I wasn’t going to be able to have the last word on any story for any meaningful length of time. Whereas I can have the last word on The Celestial Toymaker for a while now, for better or for worse. And I thought Rose was a place I could slip under the radar and really just have the last word on. I could do a nearly shot-by-shot analysis of Rose. It would be a bit brutal, but it could be done.

And if you combine the ideas, you have something relatively compelling. The piece basically opens by saying “what is this thing," and pointing at Rose. Then it completely takes Rose apart and looks at every component of it, in at times gratuitous detail. Then, finally, it gives an obviously correct and satisfying answer.

Within the piece, I just go back and forth between analysis and teasing the answer. It actually breaks fairly cleanly into sections - little essays on each scene, basically. There’s the Rose’s shop getting blown up scene, the domestic scene, the Doctor’s second appearance, the Clive bit, the Doctor’s third appearance, Rose finding the Nestene base, the confrontation with the Consciousness, the big explody bit, and the finish. Oh, and the opening credits, but we can be sneaky and hold those to the end too. Each one of those scenes has its own sort of flow - a “what is this thing" opening followed by an understanding of the scene and a reiteration of the whole piece’s question - what are we building towards?

The episode is familiar enough that this serves as a sort of countdown - the reader knows about how much is left before the inevitable “put up or shut up" moment, and so plays along with growing curiosity, so long as you keep the patter right.

And at that point the patter’s just doing it. That’s where this understanding of shape breaks down. Because only about half of that is in my head, and the other half is stuff I can see went on, but didn’t notice at the time. It’s why the piece works, but it’s not how I built it. That’s the tricky bit - learning to write the style you want.

Last War in Albion is instructive here. I can trace out the exact set of decisions I made before writing it, and then I can talk about starting to write it. The first thing I realized is that I wanted to do a blog about the magical war between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore. I realized this before I’d even started TARDIS Eruditorum, and I even got as far as pitching it to Rich Johnson at Bleeding Cool. He encouraged me to develop it a bit, but never responded to a sample post or two I sent, and the momentum petered out. So I shelved it and did Doctor Who on my own blog instead.

Eventually I realized it was the logical sequel to Doctor Who - my other big blog idea. The problem was that unlike Doctor Who, it would not split into books worth a damn, and I was starting to realize that the books made me money, and I liked money.

So I needed to find a shape other than books for what was still the British Comics Project in my head. I was looking at the Faction Paradox stuff for TARDIS Eruditorum around the time I was mulching this in my head, as I was also looking at The Invisibles again, and I realized that the structure I wanted was that of Book of the War - an encyclopedia of the war. This, however, was ludicrous to try to write as a blog.

So it occurred to me to take the blog in the other direction - a completely linear document of the war, from start to finish, with discursions as needed, that could someday be taken apart and reassembled as a frankly easier to use encyclopedia. So I shelved the encyclopedia idea for later - and I do intend to go back to it if Last War in Albion goes well.

Eventually I got the itch to poke at it again for some reason - I think I was just bored one night, actually - and I started thinking about how to write it. It had to start with the stuff Morrison insisted was the start, since I knew I ultimately sided with Moore, and thus absolutely couldn’t stack the deck against Morrison. And I felt like I would, since actually, at the end of the day the entire angry commentary by Grant Morrison where he shouted about how his comics career predated Alan Moore’s was a response to me. I’d asked Alan Moore the original question in the webchat for the Harvey Pekar memorial, and his answer to me is what Grant Morrison was responding to. So I had to reply, in a sense, directly to Grant Morrison and start with his 1979 work.

So I started thinking about what that would entail. What was there to say about the Near Myths stuff? But this connected with a second idea. I knew I wanted to do this encyclopedia eventually. Ultimately, my goal was to write a description of the comics that was shaped like the War in Heaven from the Faction Paradox universe. This was a heavy lift, given that the idea was that the War in Heaven couldn’t really be described directly.

So I took that seriously, deciding to treat the war as something too big to cover all at once, and to use its linear unfolding in history as a lens for something much bigger. This meant constantly looking down paths to find other interesting things to explore. So figuring out how to write about Near Myths meant figuring out the paths for it. (Actually, the first set of paths I figured out were for Maxwell the Magic Cat, because I wanted to test somewhere else in the story.) I decided on Moorcock and Ballard because Morrison went back and forth on their influence. Luther Arkwright was an obvious choice because I’d heard of him and he was important. I knew I wanted Blake to be a major theme, so I thought, OK, get him in early through Arkwright and Talbot - I knew Roger Whitson had interviewed Talbot about Blake. Burroughs was a late addition because of Moorcock and Ballard, and that seemed like basically enough.

Then I started writing bits. I quickly developed the third person style because it contrasted with Eruditorum. Likewise, the no real chapter breaks style was there to contrast with Eruditorum, and to just embrace the problem of there being no easy book separations with this material. I started writing the paths I was most confident about, then stringing those into the ones I was less confident about. Which is a fairly handy way of approaching something. I write in Scrivener, which makes rearranging paragraphs and reordering sections particularly easy, and just filled in bits until I got to the start and finish. Then I cut it into blog posts from there, consciously interrupting mid-point so as to heighten the sense of the War as a narrative that cannot be broken down into discrete parts.

You’ll note the bit I elided there was again how to actually write it, though this time it’s more visible. I started by writing the bits that were closest to where the ideas came from. I knew the paths structure meant a lot of brushing up on side topics, so I found a given topic I knew I wanted to talk about that seemed fairly short and I wrote it. I think the first bit was Ballard, then Moorcock, then Burroughs, though usually i switched among two or three sections so that when one got frustrating I could just move to something else. Another way to put this is that I just wrote the bits that were in my head when I sat down to write, and worked on stitching them together later given that I’d figured out the shape enough to know how to stitch.

Another way to put it is that I sat on the idea until I could make myself imagine the way I wanted reading the piece to feel. And once I knew what it felt like to read it, I started writing the bits that I knew the feeling of the best and that interested me the most. And from there the rest fell into place.

None of this, of course, is a guide on how to figure out the shape of a piece of writing.  Myriads of other ways to do this exist, many of them very different from how I do it. Many are used by writers far better than me. If you know how to figure out the shape of a piece of writing like Alan Moore does, go do that, don’t listen to me.

Rather, the point is to try to describe what the problem looks like in the hopes that it makes it easier for others to see it, identify it, and figure out how to solve it for themselves.

There's always a lot of jockeying for position in any political party, but it appears to be particularly strident within the Lib Dems in the lead-up to this September's conference in Glasgow. In the blue corner, there is much talk of anti-Clegg "lefties" and "socialists" trying to scupper the 2015 manifesto by making it skew too far left for coalition to be possible with anyone other than Labour - ignoring how left-skewed our manifesto was in 2010, and yet we still managed coalition with the Tories. In the red corner the talk is of "the leadership and their lackeys" trying to scupper the 2015 manifesto too far right and the membership already deserting in droves will go into freefall and the sky is falling, the sky is falling.

The reality is almost certainly a bit of both, and I find myself in the yellow corner, increasingly lonely and bemused. I'd quite like our manifesto to be Liberal, and bugger left or right.

I fear that the background to this is that both sides are positioning from what they fear might happen, rather than what is likely to actually happen. The media and the Westminster bubble have settled on the idea that the Lib Dems will be wiped out, or certainly lose lots of MPs, in 2015. I think both sides in this particular debate have drunk that Kool Aid. Thus we get Clegg's 87% Straw Man that the membership doesn't want power and they are naive idealists and they are hampering him from taking the party forward; because if we lose lots of seats in 2015 Clegg can then turn round and say I TOLD YOU! It's your fault, you unrealistic idealists! Meanwhile the other faction are saying that if we lose lots of seats in 2015 it'll be Clegg's fault for selling out the party's principles, for buying in to Osbornomics, and for not listening to the membership.

Both factions are becoming increasingly entrenched, I have good friends on both sides, and it bothers me that both sides are acting out of fear, rather than rational thought.

The media narrative that we are doomed is flawed. Pretty much all of the commentariat base their assumptions on who will win and lose seats on uniform national swing. As Lib Dems we should surely know that this is utter bollocks. A swift glance at any list in any newspaper of seats that the Lib Dems are predicted to lose should surely show that. Yes, we might lose a few. But we're not going to lose Adrian Sanders, for example, or Greg Mullholland, or many others who appear without fail on such lists. To say we are is to ignore the realities on the ground in those individual seats.

Well, I say we're not. The reality is, of course, the more entrenched and fearful both sides become, the more self-fulfilling the prophecy becomes. If the party is too busy warring within itself to campaign properly...

Nobody knows for sure what will happen in 2015. But I'll put my prediction on the table right now: it'll be a mirror image of 2010. In 2010 everybody wanted Labour out but nobody wanted the Tories in. The electorate detested both main parties, and Clegg had painted himself as a breath of fresh air. There were huge numbers of protest votes and spoilt ballots. A lot of the protest votes were for the Lib Dems, but because they were spread pretty evenly across the nation, they didn't translate into actual seats. Nobody got an overall majority. In 2015 everybody will want Cameron out, but nobody will want Millibland in. The electorate now detest THREE main parties, and Niggle Farridge has managed to paint himself as a breath of fresh air. There will be even lower turnout, even higher numbers of protest votes, and nobody will get an overall majority. UKIP will get a big slice of the protest votes, but it will be spread evenly across the nation and won't translate into actual seats. Labour will be the biggest party, but not by much. Coalition will only be mathematically possible with Labour though, just as in 2010 it was only mathematically possible with the Tories. But the Labour party don't WANT a coalition like the Tories did, so the negotiations will fall down, or produce a coalition deal that won't pass the triple lock, and Labour will form a minority government - thus if the red corner ARE positioning for coalition with Labour, they're on a hiding to nothing because Labour don't and won't want it.

At the end of the day, though, we can't know whether I'm right or wrong on that till it happens, and therefore we can't control for it. The electorate is a fickle beast, and trying to pander to what we think they might want, whether starting from the red corner OR the blue corner, is futile and self-defeating. Instead, perhaps what we should adopt for policies is what we think is right, what we think will work to achieve the desired outcomes of a stronger economy in a fairer society (TM Lib Dem HQ) and try to persuade the public that what we are going for is right and will work?

I know, I know, I'm doing my King Canute impression again, aren't I?

comments