Since I haven’t blogged about Tim at all yet, I should probably begin (just to be clear where I’m coming from) by saying that I voted for Tim, and I was thrilled that he won the leadership contest. I think Tim will be a fantastic asset to the party during his tenure as leader.

Anyhoo, last night he gave an interview to Channel 4 News’s Cathy Newman (reported here under the bizarrely self-referential headline “Tim Farron asked three times if gay sex is a sin”) which has caused some uproar amongst some within the party, not least those with doubts about Tim’s ability to separate his faith from his role as an MP legislating for people of all faiths and none.

Norman Lamb’s leadership campaign (ultimately unsuccessful, but nevertheless quite effective, having narrowed the expected margin between the two contenders substantially) played quite heavily on these doubts, and certainly made misgivings about Tim’s faith more of a live issue within the party. In my own case, feeling like I know reasonably well who Tim is, and, as a bisexual man, feeling like I am quite capable of evaluating his record on LGBT rights for myself, the Lamb campaign’s dog whistling proved counter-productive, making me if anything more inclined to support Tim. Given the reactions last night of a number of friends, acquaintances, and fellow LGBT+ folk who I’ve not yet met, I suspect I wasn’t the only one.

As ever, the news media like to tug at anything they perceive as a loose thread, to see what might unravel. I don’t think it’s entirely fair, though, to blame Norman’s campaign for this line of questioning. As many people who had doubts about Tim argued, it’s not just that he’s a Christian, it’s that his voting record in some areas is sufficiently out of line with the majority of the party, and in ways which, superficially, fit into a standard “traditional Christian” frame. As such, the question of whether his faith determines his actions as a politician is a legitimate one, and one of which we probably haven’t heard the last. It’s for that reason that I’m writing about this, rather than just ignoring it and hoping we all move onto something more interesting, much as I’d like to.

The general objection to last night’s interview was that Tim sounded shifty and evasive, and I’ve seen a number of comments about last night’s interview along the lines of “Tim needs to have a better, sharper answer to questions like this”, but not many suggestions as to what that answer should be. After all, the consensus seems to be that a straight “yes” or “no” answer wouldn’t help either, leading inevitably to more questions; to return to the “loose thread” metaphor, once they start pulling on it, where does it stop? So I thought I’d have a go at figuring out what the problem with Tim’s answers actually is, and what the right answer might look like. Firstly, here’s what actually was said in the interview:

CN: You’ve abstained during votes on Same Sex Marriage in the past. You’ve said recently that, politically, you regret that. Personally, though, do you think, as a Christian, that homosexual sex is a sin?

TF: Well I think that, first of all, I mean, somebody who is a Christian does not then go enforcing their views on other people. And it’s not our issues, our views on personal morality that matter, what matters is do we go out there and fight for the freedom of every single individual to be who they wish to be –

CN: OK, I take your point –

TF: That’s what makes a liberal.

CN: OK, but I’m asking for your personal view, do you personally, as a Christian, believe that homosexual sex is a sin?

TF: To understand Christianity is to understand that we are all sinners, and perhaps the Bible phrase that I use most with my kids, but actually on myself, is that you don’t pick out the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye, when there is a plank in your own. The reality is, to understand the Bible, and if perhaps another time you want a long theological discussion, the – my understanding is – well, my firm belief is that we are all sinners.

CN: OK, but when the Bible says “you shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female, it is an abomination” you don’t have any problem with that?

TF: Well look, I mean, so – fundamentally, my faith is based upon my belief that Jesus Christ is who he said he is. But, again, Cathy, you know, this is a very interesting discussion, it’s important to me, but I’ve not just been –

CN: But it’s important to your party as well, because these are values that I appreciate are your personal values, but they’re not very liberal values, are they?

TF: I mean, come off it, we’ve just been led, or at least we were for seven years during, you know, the early part of this last decade, by a Roman Catholic for seven years; Charles Kennedy who led us so passionately against the appalling Blair/Bush Iraq war, and who built us up to our strongest point in our recent history. We were led, admittedly a century and a bit ago, by Gladstone, arguably our most successful leader ever. This is the party that is based upon religious tolerance, and indeed the tolerance of people who are not religious at all, and defending the rights of every individual, whether they be a member of a minority or not. It’s a peculiar thing to say that somebody who happens to belong to a religious group, who’s a Christian, can’t be a liberal. It’s exactly the opposite: to be a member of a minority group of any kind, is to understand in a very clear way, why it is that every minority, every individual’s rights matter. My rights are your rights, whatever you believe, whatever I believe.

What strikes me immediately about those answers is that, much as Tim has felt it unfair that he is asked such faith-based questions, his instinct is always to answer them “as a Christian” first, and “as a Liberal” second. Each time Newman asks him whether he thinks “homosexual sex is a sin”, the first substantive things he says are, respectively:

“somebody who is a Christian does not…”

“To understand Christianity…”

“fundamentally, my faith is based upon…”

The first and last time, he does manage to work his way around to how that fits into the picture of his liberalism:

“…That’s what makes a liberal.”

“… It’s exactly the opposite: to be a member of a minority group of any kind, is to understand in a very clear way, why it is that every minority, every individual’s rights matter.”

It is precisely because Tim offers answers to such questions which do explore his views on faith that he will keep getting asked them. I assume that this is not accidental, that Tim has consciously decided that it is important to him not to hide his faith, and indeed to take opportunities to affirm publicly his “belief that Jesus Christ is who he said he is”, etc. It’s not a view I share (I’m an atheist), but I can empathise with it, given the basic parameters of a Christian faith. I’d love to figure out a response to Newman’s questions which is compatible with that urge and doesn’t open a can of worms, but I have to admit I’m a bit stumped.

Nonetheless, the honesty which is at the heart of Tim’s apparent shiftiness here (he refuses to say something which he doesn’t really feel, even if it might be a more expedient answer) is an asset, not a liability. The willingness to actually engage with a question which Tim shows here is laudable, it’s just that he needs to remember what his priorities are when being interviewed as leader of the Liberal Democrats, not as “Tim Farron, Christian”. Whilst being mindful of the need to “let Bartlet be Bartlet“, then, my conclusion is that the best way for Tim to conduct himself as leader of the party is to train himself to make sure that the first words out of his mouth in response to such questions are always “Liberal-first”. What might that look like? I’d love to hear other suggestions, but here’s my stab at it:

CN: You’ve abstained during votes on Same Sex Marriage in the past. You’ve said recently that, politically, you regret that. Personally, though, do you think, as a Christian, that homosexual sex is a sin?

TF: First of all, Cathy, I voted in favour of Same Sex Marriage at Second Reading, the kind of “broad principle” stage of the legislative process. I abstained at Third Reading, the “nitty-gritty details” stage of the process, because I did feel there were areas of the bill which were insufficiently liberal. One of those areas was on conscience protections for registrars, which is about freedom of religion, a key liberal principle. Another area was on the spousal veto, an area of the bill which was (and still is) of great concern to many trans people. What I regret is that people have read that abstention as me being opposed to Same Sex Marriage, which I am not. What matters here is not my own personal faith, what matters is how I do my job as a liberal.

CN: OK, I take your point, but I’m asking for your personal view, do you personally, as a Christian, believe that homosexual sex is a sin?

TF: Look, I’m not going to answer that directly, Cathy, and let me explain why. As a Liberal, I believe in the separation of Church and State, and my role, the reason I’m on your programme tonight, is that I lead a political party – I am very much on the “State” side of that separation. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful in a secular democracy for our politicians to start pontificating about their own personal views on faith, so I’m not going to do it now, no matter how many times you ask me. The question is not what I might think is a sin or not, the question is where the law should stand, and what rights and protections people should have. As a Liberal, my instinct on that question is to protect individuals rights and freedoms, whether that is the freedom to love who you love, or the freedom to believe what you believe.

CN: OK, but when the Bible says “you shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female, it is an abomination” you don’t have any problem with that?

TF: Well look, I am not here to lead a theological discussion about individual verses in the Bible. As important as that is to me, it isn’t my job as leader of the Liberal Democrats. If you want a range of considered views on that question I suggest you take it up with the clergy.

CN: But it’s important to your party as well, because these are values that I appreciate are your personal values, but they’re not very liberal values, are they?

TF: I think that’s a fundamental misreading of what liberalism is. This is the party that is based upon religious tolerance, and indeed the tolerance of people who are not religious at all, and defending the rights of every individual, whether they be a member of a minority or not. “Liberal values” are not about what positions people may or may not hold as a matter of personal faith, “liberal values” are about tolerating others who you don’t agree with, and protecting each others’ rights to live our lives as we choose to, so long as we aren’t harming anyone else. It’s a peculiar thing to say that somebody who happens to belong to a religious group, who’s a Christian, can’t be a liberal. It’s exactly the opposite: to be a member of a minority group of any kind, is to understand in a very clear way, why it is that every minority, every individual’s rights matter. My rights are your rights, whatever you believe, whatever I believe.

Anyone got a better idea?

How do people swear in your state? Believe it or not, someone has made a study of this.

I have never been bothered by "those words" and I think the world is coming around to that point of view. Those who are bothered need to hang out with folks who use those words casually and to good effect in conversation.

But I will admit I do have one prejudice in this area. Whenever a man uses the word "bitch" to refer to a woman, unless it's clearly a joke, I always think that man has a problem with all women, not just with the one he's so labelling. For a long time, any male I heard refer to a female that way obviously was angry that she was not being subservient and less-than-equal the way he believed a female ought to be. I am willing to admit that there may be exceptions but every time I hear a guy say it, that's what I think. And it may still be valid in a majority of cases.

The post You'll Swear By This appeared first on News From ME.

[Content warning: suicide]

I.

It all started when I made that phone call.

I was really bad. All the tenure-track positions I’d applied to had politely declined, and I saw my future in academia gradually slipping away from me. Then the night before, my boyfriend had said he thought maybe we should start seeing other people. I didn’t even know if we were broken up or not, and at that point I couldn’t bring myself to care. I sat on my bed, thinking about things for a while, and finally I called the suicide hotline.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice answered on the other side. Somehow, just hearing someone else made me feel about five times better.

“Hello,” I said, a little more confidently. “I’ve been thinking of committing suicide. I need help.”

“Okay,” she said. “Is there a gun in your house?”

“No.”

“All right. The first thing you need to do is get one. Overdosing on pills is common, but it almost never works. You can get a firearm at almost any large sporting goods store, but if there aren’t any near you, we can start talking about maybe jumping from a high…”

“What the HELL?” I interrupted, suddenly way more angry than depressed. “You’re supposed to @#!$ing tell me not to do it!”

“This is the suicide hotline,” the woman said, now sounding confused. Then, “Are you sure you weren’t thinking of the suicide prevention hotline?”

“Give me a break! I took a psychology class in undergrad, I know what a suicide hotline is!”

“I’m sorry you seem to be upset. But this is the suicide hotline. It’s like how there’s the Walk For Breast Cancer, but also the Walk Against Breast Cancer.”

“There’s the what? But…I was in the Walk For Breast Cancer! I thought…”

“It sounds like you have some issues,” said the woman, politely.

“Ugh,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Do you feel like you need professional help?”

“Yeah.”

“I do have a free clinic with an opening available tomorrow at three PM, would you like me to slot you in for an appointment?”

So you’re probably wondering why in the world I would take an appointment arranged by the suicide hotline that wasn’t a suicide prevention hotline. The answer is – were you even listening? A free clinic? With an appointment available the next day? Normally I was lucky if I found a place with an opening in less than two months and a co-pay that wasn’t completely ruinious. You bet I was taking that appointment before someone else snatched it up.

Dr. Trauer’s office looked gratifyingly normal. There was a houseplant, a diagram of the cranial nerves, some Abilify® merchandise, and on the wall one of those Magic Eye stereographic images that resolved into a 3D picture of the human brain. Dr. Trauer himself looked like your average doctor – a little past middle age, a little overweight, a short greying beard. He motioned me to sit down and took the paperwork I’d been filling out.

“Hmmmm,” he said, reading it over. “29 years old, postdoc in biochem, recent relationship trouble…mmmm…you did the right thing.”

“In coming here?”

“No, in considering suicide. After getting rejected from a tenure-track position, your life is pretty much over.”

“WHAT?”

“I mean, here you are, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, with only one area of expertise, and now you’ve been rejected from it. I can totally see why you might think it’s worth ending it all.”

“But…there are lots of other things I can do! I can get a job in industry! I can work in something else! Even if I can’t find a job right away, I have parents who can help support me.”

“Industry!” Dr. Trauer was having none of it. “A bunch of bloodsuckers. Do you realize how bad work in the private sector is these days? They’ll abuse you and then spit you out, and once you’ve been out of university too long nobody else will want you.”

“Lots of people want biochemists! If I work for a company for a few years, I’ll have more experience and maybe that will make me more attractive to employers! What…what kind of a psychiatrist are you, anyway?”

“Cindy didn’t tell you?”

“Cindy?”

“The woman on the phone.”

“She didn’t really tell me anything!”

“Well,” said Dr. Trauer. “To answer your question, we’re dark side psychiatrists. This is the state’s only dark side psychiatry clinic.”

“Dark side psychiatry? Really?”

“We’re a…well, some people say sect, but I like to think of it as more of a guild…dedicated to improving negative mental health. Think of it this way. When you’re a hijacked murder-monkey hurtling toward your inevitable death, sanity is a completely ridiculous thing to have. And when the universe is fifteen billion light-years across and almost entirely freezing void, the idea that people should have ‘coping skills’ boggles the imagination. An emotionally healthy person is a person who isn’t paying attention, and our job is to cure them.”

“There’s more than one of you?”

“Oh, yes. There’s a thriving dark side psychiatric community. There are dark side psychopharmacologists – you’d be amazed what a few doses of datura can do to a person. There are dark side psychotherapists who analyze and break down people’s positive cognitions. There are dark side child psychiatrists who catch people when they’re young, before sanity has had a chance to take root and worsen. And there are dark side geriatric psychiatrists, who go from nursing home to nursing home, making sure that the elderly are not warehoused and neglected at exactly the time it is most important to ensure that stroke or dementia does not protect them from acute awareness of the nearness of death.”

“That’s awful!” I said.

“Is it? Look where sanity’s gotten you. You want to kill yourself, but you don’t have the courage. Work with me for ten sessions, and I promise you we can help you get that courage.”

“You’re a @#!$ing quack,” I said. “And if you think killing yourself is so great, how come you haven’t done it yourself yet?”

“Who says I haven’t?” asked Dr. Trauer.

His hand went to his face, and he plucked out his right eye, revealing an empty void surrounded by the bleached whiteness of bone. I screamed and ran out of the clinic and didn’t stop running until I was in my house and had locked the door beside me.

II.

“…and that’s pretty much the whole story, doctor,” she told me. “And then I looked to see if there were any real psychiatrists in the area and someone referred me to you.”

“Well,” I said, my face unreadable. “I can certainly see why you’re complaining of, how did you put it, ‘depression and acute stress disorder’.”

“Not so acute anymore. It took me two months to get an appointment at your clinic.”

“Oh,” I said. Then, “Sorry, we’re sort of backed up.” Then, “Okay. We’ve got a lot we have to work on here. Let me tell you how we’re going to do it. We’re going to use a form of therapy that challenges your negative cognitions. We’re going to take the things that are bothering you, examine the evidence for them, and see if there are alternative explanations.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well,” I said. “It seems to be this Dr. Trauer incident that’s traumatized you a lot. I can see why you would be stressed out. The way you tell it, it sounds absolutely terrifying.”

“You don’t believe me,” she said, not accusatory, just stating a fact.

“I think it would be helpful to examine alternate explanations,” I said. “I’m willing to assume it happened exactly as you tell it. I can see why you would think Dr. Trauer wanted you to commit suicide. But are there any alternative explanations for the same event?”

“I don’t see how there can be,” she said. “He outright said that he thought I should kill myself.”

“Right. But from what you know of psychiatrists and therapy – and you did say you took some classes in undergrad – are there any other reasons he might have said something like that?”

She thought for a second. “Wait,” she told me. “There’s a technique in therapy called paradoxical intention. Where you take a patient’s irrational thought, and then defend and amplify it. And then when the patient hears it from someone else, she realizes how silly it sounds and starts arguing against it, and then it’s really hard to keep believing it after you’ve shot it down yourself.”

I nodded. “That’s definitely a therapeutic method, and sometimes a very effective one. Do you have any evidence that this is what Dr. Trauer was doing?”

“Yes! As soon as he said I should commit suicide, I started arguing against him. He told me that if I couldn’t get a tenure track position there would be no other jobs available, and I told him there would be! Then he told me that the jobs would be terrible and I’d never be able to make a happy life for myself with them, and I argued that I would! That must have been what he was going for!”

She suddenly looked really excited. Then, just as suddenly, the worry returned to her face.

“But then what happened with his eye? I swear I saw him take it right out of the socket.”

I nodded. “Can you think of any alternate explanations for that?”

Thinking about it that way, it only took her like five seconds. She slapped her head like she’d been an idiot. “A glass eye. He probably had some kind of injury, had to put in a glass eye, and could take it out any time he wanted. He must have thought it would be a funny gag and didn’t realize how traumatized I’d be. Or he wanted to scare me into realizing how much I wanted to live. Or something.”

I nodded. “That does sound like a reasonable explanation.”

“But…don’t people with glass eyes usually have like scar tissue and normal skin behind them? This guy, I swear it was just the bone and this empty socket, like you were seeing straight to his skull.”

“You’re asking the right questions,” I said. “Now think a little more.”

“Hmmmm,” she said. “I guess I was really, really stressed out at the time. And I only saw it for, like, a fraction of a second. Maybe my brain was playing tricks on me.”

“That can definitely happen,” I agreed.

She looked a lot better now. “I owe you a lot of thanks,” she said. “I’ve only been here for, like, fifteen minutes, and already I think a lot of my stress has gone away. All of this really makes sense. That paradoxical intention thing is actually kind of brilliant. And I can’t deny that it worked – I haven’t been suicidal since I talked to the guy. In fact…okay, this is going to sound really strange, but…maybe I should go back to Dr. Trauer.”

I wrinkled my forehead.

“It’s not that I don’t like you,” she said. “But he had this amazing free clinic, and what he did for me that day…now that I realize what was going on, that was actually pretty incredible.”

“Hold on a second,” I said.

I left the room, marched up to the front desk, took the directory of medical providers in the area off the shelf, marched back to the room. I started flipping through the pages. It was in alphabetical order…Tang…Thompson…Tophet…there we go. Trauer. My gaze lingered there maybe just a second too long, and she asked if I was okay.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “It’s just that he doesn’t – he doesn’t take your insurance. That’s the problem.”

“It’s okay,” she told me. “He said it was a free clinic. So that shouldn’t a problem.”

“Well, uh…the thing is…when you see out-of-network providers, your insurance actually charges, charges an extra fee. Even if the visit itself is free.”

She looked skeptical. “I’ve never heard of that.”

“It’s new. With Obamacare.”

“Really? How high a fee is it?”

“It’s…um…ten thousand dollars. Yeah, I know, right? Thanks, Obama.”

“Wow,” she said. “I definitely can’t afford that. I guess I’ll keep coming here. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. You’ve been very nice. It’s just that…with Dr. Trauer…well…sorry, I’ll stop talking now. Thanks a lot, doctor.” She stood up and shook my hand before heading for the door. “Seriously, I can’t believe how much you’ve helped me.”

No, I thought, as she departed you can’t. I told her she was asking the right questions, and she was, but not all of them.

For example, why would a man with only one working eye have a stereographic Magic Eye image in his office?

I picked up my provider directory again, stared a second time at the entry for Dr. Trauer. There was a neat line through it in red pen, and above, in my secretary’s careful handwriting, “DECEASED”.

Before returning the directory to the front desk, I took my own pen and added “DO NOT REFER” in big letters underneath.

#886, 23rd December 2000

Her career catalysed by her inclusion on “Stan”, Dido’s soft-spoken, ruminative pop became a familiar sound in early 00s Britain. On her second album, Life For Rent, she hit on a metaphor that cuts to the country’s quick, and obliquely hints why a stout claymation builder became the best-selling song of this over-stuffed year. “Life For Rent”, the song, takes the difference between renting and owning as its organising metaphor. “If my life is for rent,” Dido sings wistfully, “And I don’t learn to buy, I deserve nothing more than I get, cos nothing I have is truly mine”. Renting is provisionality, fear, the option of people who are just passing through, and whose opinion is too weak to count for much. Buying, on the other hand – now that’s commitment, maturity, the act of an adult.

More than an adult, a citizen. Bob the Builder was not the only such on TV. The screens of England in the 00s were full of property developers and home improvers, and they were us. Popular conservatism in the second half of the 20th century rested on the notion of the “property-owning democracy”, advanced by Anthony Eden and restated by Thatcher: the idea that private home ownership gave you a stake in the market economy. It was one of Thatcherism’s most seductive promises, and by the end of the century home-owners and their obsessions were a central part of British mass culture. But the emphasis had shifted – owning a house was no longer just a stake, it was a bet. One with generous odds and extravagant returns. If in 2000 Bob the Builder had built you a house in his home town of Bobsville – valued, naturally, at the UK average – then in seven years its value would have shot from £80,000 to £180,000. Stupefying inflation, and since real wages (or even fake ones) didn’t rise at remotely the same rate, it amounts to a one-off generational transfer of wealth to older homeowners that our economy and society is still reeling from. As the most popular Bob The Builder meme puts it, “Can We Fix It? No, It’s Fucked.”

Of course, Bob, like most 00s builders, didn’t do that much house-building. While his real-life counterparts busied themselves with conversions, regeneration projects, and the installation of square miles of decking, Bob’s jobs were cartoon economy staples – fixing a farmer’s fence so badgers couldn’t trample his crops, for instance. Bob is a benign figure, a mild-mannered, all-wise Dad to the eager, sometimes fractious machines in his charge. If he’s an avatar of Britain’s property mania, it’s no reflection on him as a character. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, kids’ culture is as sure a national barometer as you’ll find – it’s no accident that the hot new character find of 2000 is a builder.

The levels of his popularity seem startling now. Few current fandoms compare to Bobmania. Perhaps none do. This is the only million-seller of the year, the triumph of the new singles market that had pushed releases into supermarkets and Woolworths, where browsing parents would see them. And the single was just the tip of it. Bob toys sold out. Bob appearances sold out. Parents scrapped and four year olds trampled one another in stage invasions when Bob’s affable globular head wobbled into view. The cartoon became a kids’ TV classic, still in endless repeats (as well as new episodes) when I became a Dad myself. Neil Morrissey, playing Bob, became even richer.

Much of the enthusiasm was deserved. Bob The Builder is a well-crafted TV show with some excellent voice acting – especially from Rob Rackstraw, whose cackling, gulping Spud the Scarecrow is up with Zippy from Rainbow and Kenneth Williams’ Evil Edna as one of British childrens’ programming’s great comic voices. The machines are a colourful and entertaining cast, and well suited to the themes of friendship and effort each episode teases out. They are endlessly mechandisable, of course, but such is post-Teletubby reality, and Bob, unlike other cartoons, was restrained in the number of new characters it added to pump money out of the kids. Not everything is perfect: Wendy, Bob’s business partner, is hardly ever backed up by other good women characters, and rarely gets good stories of her own. For a flavour of Bob at his best, check out the 2003 Christmas special, A Christmas To Remember, where you’ll be treated not only to the standard Bobsville cast, but to an Elton John cameo, Chris Evans playing a rock star, and best of all, Noddy Holder guesting as the roadie, Banger.

The presence of rock stars (and Britpop boosters) hints at why “Can We Fix It?” exists and why it sounds like it does. Unlike the people at Ragdoll Productions, Neil Morrissey fancied himself a music fan, and felt a duty to make a song that might entertain adults as well as their kids. Or at least do their ears no great harm. “Can We Fix It?” is built around the cheery theme tune from the series, introducing the cast in a compact thirty seconds. To make it into a single, they toughen the music up, turning the song into a rudimentary kiddie-rock stomper. The entertaining video has Bob in a club, referencing blokey heroes of the British pop mainstream – Liam Gallagher is in there, who older kids might just about recognise, but also Madness, who they surely wouldn’t. The record keeps cartoon voices to a minimum – a missed opportunity if anything, as the show’s were good. It does its job with gusto and a knowledge of its own limitations. Neil Morrissey is no singer, and “Bob and the gang make a really good sound” is a statement of hope more than faith, but for kids, the record is chunky and satisfying with a call-and-response hook (“YES WE CAN!”) whose effectiveness has since been independently validated. Ten years on, I could play the video on an iphone to my children and they would chortle happily at the antics of Bob and the crew: an experience I’m quite happy to admit tilts my score a little higher.

It’s the sound of Britpop, long since moved out of Camden Town, settled down with a kid or two and considering a loft refurbishment once the shed’s been repaired. A happier ending than most of the ones we got in 1998, you might say. And it finishes off the year 2000, the decadent peak of Number One hitmaking, a year which switched between dazzling variety and baffling mediocrity week over week. Britain’s housing bubble is beginning its long rise; but its pop bubble is at maximum inflation. The foundations both were built on would have had Bob The Builder shaking his head and sucking air through his teeth.

Shortly before the departure of Peter Langston from the Lucasfilm Games Group, he and Steve Arnold hired one Chip Morningstar as a tools programmer. The latter was coming off a stint spent working for Ted Nelson, a sort of philosopher of information management who had coined the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia” back in the 1960s. Morningstar, who says that “few people could actually work with Ted for more than a day or two without becoming clinically insane,” was initially thrilled to just hunker down making practical tools for game development on the Games Group’s Unix workstations.

But then, on one of his final days at the office, Langston tried to interest everyone in a joint playthrough of his own old multiplayer grand-strategy classic Empire, for the purpose of, according to Morningstar, “getting us to think about alternative modalities of game design.” They all played for many hours and then, with Langston’s encouragement, picked apart what they liked and didn’t like about the experience. Morningstar found he didn’t much like the very thing that seemingly made Empire a game: the cycle of build-up, increasing conflict, and the final triumph of one player — or, more frequently, the final nuclear annihilation of all of them. He would prefer it if “the world was much bigger and the player goals more open-ended.” He wrote up a proposal for an online portal to host a “10,000-player computer game” that showed the influence of Ted Nelson’s visions of networked consciousness as well as the cyberpunk science fictions that he’d been reading a lot of lately — works like True Names by Vernor Vinge and William Gibson’s brand new, seminal Neuromancer. The poetic language he employed in his proposal rather self-consciously echoes Gibson’s own descriptions of cyberspace.

Picture, if you will, a network, an intricate web of knots and threads spanning thousands of miles. The knots are machines, made of silicon, metal, and plastic. The threads are metal wires. It is a computer network. The machines are computers, sitting in homes, schools, and offices across the continent. The wires are telephone lines, tying the hundreds upon hundreds of individual processors into a single, unified whole. At each of these machines sit people. People of all kinds and all ages… they experience the signs and sounds of that which exists only in the wholeness of the web, and in their own minds.

Steve Arnold made a habit of filing away all of the ideas that poured out of his charges, even seemingly outlandish ones like this one. After all, you never knew what might be worth considering if the right partner and/or situation came along.

We haven’t had much occasion to talk about it yet on this blog, but PCs had always been seen by hackers as, amongst other things, tools of communication. One might even say it was in the PC industry’s very DNA. Well before Apple, for instance, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had gotten their start as businessmen by selling “blue boxes” for purposes of “phone phreaking,” hacking the telephone system to make free long-distance calls. (The widespread application of telecommunications technology to illegal activities would also be an ongoing theme of the young industry.) The first modems were available almost as soon as the first PCs, using hardware designs adapted from bigger institutional computer systems.

To say that using a computer for telecommunications was challenging in the early days hardly begins to describe the situation. “Modem” stands for “modulator/demodulator.” It converts data into sound and transmits it over a phone line, the “modulating” part of the process. What sounds like an unholy racket to human ears can be converted — “demodulated” — back into data that a computer can understand by another modem at the other end of the line. A modem monopolized the phone line, meaning that unless you lived alone or could afford to spring for a second line, negotiations on its use with other householders were likely to be tense ones. Once made, modem connections were notoriously unstable. In many areas even the “call waiting” tone resulting from an incoming call would knock you off the line while simultaneously leaving you no way to answer the second call, a useless double whammy if ever there was one. And Modems were slow. A 300-baud modem, for many years the standard, could transmit or receive at about 35 characters per second, meaning a single line of text on an 80-column screen took well over two seconds to print, a full screen of 25 lines almost a full minute.

Assuming you were willing to put up with all these annoyances, whom should you actually call using your computer? The World Wide Web was still many years in the future, the Internet itself largely restricted to users at big universities and other research institutions, discussing esoteric subjects using specialized messaging software. Your realistic options could thus largely be divided into two categories: the so-called computerized bulletin-board systems, or BBSes, and, in time, bigger commercial dial-up services.

The typical BBS operator was a guy not that different from you who had elected to set up a little online presence with a spare computer — or a primary computer when he wasn’t actually using it — and a second phone line. Since these systems usually only had one modem and one phone line, only one user could actually be online at a time. Accessing a popular system was thus generally a matter of setting up a “war dialer,” a program to dial the BBS’s number again and again until the busy signal was replaced with a modem’s answering tone — all the while, of course, tying up your own phone line with the effort. Once online, you could read and post messages and upload and download software, within reason; you didn’t want to be That Guy staying online for hours and blocking everyone else out of the system. Indeed, popular systems often strictly limited your time to make sure that didn’t happen. Many of the BBSes were engines of software piracy. Thanks to phone phreaking, the necessary numbers and techniques for which were also widely distributed on pirate BBSes, pirates could call systems all over the country and the world, while more legitimate users unwilling to spend a fortune in long-distance fees were limited to those in their own hometowns. BBSes, even — especially! — the legitimate ones, were thus by their very nature very limited affairs, bound to a certain geographic area and, with only 24 hours in a day and only one phone line, sharply restricted in how many users they could realistically support. Many old-timers today will tell you that that was a big part of their charm.

Still, there was obvious potential for larger services that could bring more people together. In the late 1970s one Bill von Meister had an epiphany that would establish the model for such services for many years to come. When corporate America shut down for the evening, he realized, millions of processing hours on time-shared institutional computers went unused, as did much of the telecommunications infrastructure that linked all of those machines together. He founded an online service called The Source to take advantage of this excess capacity by essentially selling it to ordinary computer users at home, who could access his system via modem using local phone numbers that served as entrance ramps to normally business-focused packet-switched networks like Tymnet and Uninet. After The Source was announced at a gala event in June of 1979 — special guest/paid spokesman Isaac Asimov was there to declare it to represent nothing less than “the start of the information age” — similar online services began to spring up in considerable numbers, their user counts to climb steadily. CompuServe, the second entrant in the burgeoning field and always the largest and most lavishly promoted, had 5000 subscribers in 1980; 145,000 in 1984; 300,000 in 1986; 460,000 in 1988.

What people did on these services was in some senses mostly the same as what they do on the Internet today. By mid-decade CompuServe offered discussion forums and chat rooms on a huge variety of topics; an online encyclopedia; electronic editions of newspapers and magazines; online banks, stockbrokers, and other financial services; worldwide weather forecasts; online shopping malls, airplane tickets, and hotel reservations; and of course your very own private email address. Games were also popular; amongst the expected slate of traditional board and card games one could find the occasional standout, like CompuServe’s MegaWars, an elaborate and addictive multiplayer strategy game played on a universal scale, not all that far removed from Peter Langston’s Empire. The first accredited online university, called simply The Electronic University, already had 10,000 students by 1985, offering seven degrees from an Associates in the Arts to an MBA. The mainstream media began to publish the occasional skeptical report on a new phenomenon known as “online personals,” noting with shock that some people had supposedly ended up marrying others that they had first met online. Indeed, the amount of sharing that took place online was a constant source of surprise to the unwired. An apocryphal tale made the rounds, winding up eventually even on PBS’s Computer Chronicles program, of a woman who had announced on a chat room that she had had enough, that she was about to kill herself right there and then, only to be talked down from the brink by her interlocutors. Less positively but more inevitably, politicians began to fret about online pornography and child predation, making it an explicit crime to use a computer to traffic in child pornography — it was anyway, but that’s politics for you — with the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988.

It’s easy enough to see these services, described as I just have in the abstract, as essentially equivalent to the World Wide Web of today. That, however, would be a mistake. I really need to emphasize just how limited and primitive online services of the 1980s were by modern standards. Without the bandwidth to send pictures and with few computers capable of displaying them with any fidelity at all anyway, the online services were made of nothing but text, laboriously transmitted page by page at speeds of 300 or at best 1200 baud. There were no hyperlinks, no mouse support, no color, no sound, no fonts, no page layout, no windows or columns, just walls of slowly printing monospaced monochrome text separated by menu prompts in the form of blinking cursors. And each of these services was a world unto itself: if you signed up for CompuServe, you could only use those facilities that CompuServe offered, could only chat or send mail to other CompuServe subscribers. The interoperability and interconnectedness that define the World Wide Web of today didn’t exist, making your choice of which service to splurge for a fraught one indeed.

Finally, these services were expensive, staggeringly so by modern standards. In 1985 it cost $40 just to sign up with CompuServe, then $6 per hour at 300 baud or $12.50 per hour at 1200 baud during non-business hours. As for usage during business hours, that was so expensive that you didn’t even want to think about it — which was, after all, kind of the point. The other services charged similar rates. Small wonder that avid users devised and shared a multitude of techniques, from command shortcuts for bypassing layers of menus to ways of collecting digests of messages for reading offline, to minimize their time spent connected. And small wonder as well that, despite the services’ steadily increasing user bases, for many years relatively few computer owners had the requisite combination of financial wherewithal and patience to make use of them. At mid-decade it was estimated that less than 5 percent of active home-computer users subscribed to one of the commercial online services, while less than 40 percent of them even owned modems.

Those numbers represented opportunity. That, anyway, was how they were seen by Steve Case, marketing director for a heretofore underwhelming would-be purveyor of telecommunications services called Quantum Computer Services. Case came up with a scheme that would address some if not all of the reasons that most users still stayed away from the big online services. His QuantumLink would work only on Commodore 64s. Rather than using generic text-oriented terminal software, it would be given away as a user-friendly, colorful, point-and-click-driven application that would nevertheless interface with Quantum’s online databases via modem. And, aware that the Commodore market was the most price-conscious in computing, Case made QuantumLink dramatically cheaper than any other service: a flat fee of $10 per month, plus $3.60 per hour for certain “premium services,” whether delivered at 300 or 1200 baud. The scheme did come with its drawbacks, like the fact that major additions to the service would require the mailing of a new disk to every customer, and of course the fact that it would be limited to Commodore users, but on the whole Case believed the advantages would far outweigh the disadvantages.

Critically, Case was able to convince Commodore themselves to sign on as sponsor and principal investor, making QuantumLink the “official” online service for Commodore owners. QuantumLink “telecommunications starter kits” were soon being inserted into every Commodore modem package, not to mention everywhere else Case could find to stick them. He was determined to make QuantumLink the easier, friendlier online service, suitable for the non-technical. “For the average guy,” he says, “we needed to offer the market something that was a little easier and cheaper and more useful.” Case’s “average guys” would sign up with QuantumLink to the tune of about 50,000 members one year after the service made its debut in November of 1985 — not bad numbers at all for a brand new, platform-specific online service that was starting from scratch.

QuantumLink’s point-and-click main menu.

An online chat on QuantumLink.

QuantumLink featured a fairly typical slate of offerings, including plenty of games. The Commodore 64 was after all the premier gaming computer in the country, and the QuantumLink software had actually been built from the remnants of an earlier, failed venture called PlayNet, an attempt to create an online service revolving exclusively around games. QuantumLink’s games were largely inherited from that effort, including old standbys like backgammon, chess, checkers, hangman, and Go, as well as an online casino that dealt in perks rather than money. There were also heaps of public-domain games to download and play offline, plus demo versions of commercial games. Still, right from the outset QuantumLink and Commodore looked for an online game that was newer, bigger, and more exciting, something the likes of which had never been seen before. It was this quest that brought Clive Smith, a vice president of strategic planning at Commodore, out to Lucasfilm Games one day in the summer of 1985, well before the QuantumLink service was planned to actually go live. Smelling a chance to do something unprecedented on someone else’s dime, Steve Arnold pulled Chip Morningstar’s old proposal for a networked virtual world out of his ideas folder. Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, Smith immediately loved it. He quickly secured for Arnold and Morningstar a chance to pitch it in person to Quantum at their headquarters in Vienna, Virginia.

For his presentation, Morningstar dropped all vestiges of an “outer space/conquer the galaxy” type of game like Empire, or for that matter CompuServe’s MegaWars, in favor of a game that “looked kind of funky and suburban,” a “game” in name only that would would ultimately be all about “the social dimension — people interacting with other people.” It was an idea so unprecedented that even its originator had difficulty describing or even completely envisioning it. The closest analogues would be MUDs — “multi-user dungeons,” essentially elaborate online text adventures in the spirit of Adventure and Zork that could be occupied by dozens of players at a time. Yet, while there was certainly a strong social element at play there, most MUDs also placed a heavy emphasis on dungeon-crawling, monster-killing, and leveling-up, whilst taking place in exactly the sorts of fantasy or science-fiction worlds that Morningstar had so definitively rejected. And of course MUDs consisted solely of text, while Morningstar’s world was imagined from the start as a richly graphical environment. Groping for the right vocabulary to describe his ideas, he found himself coining new jargon of his own, some of which has persisted to this day. Most notably, he borrowed the term “avatar” from Hinduism, where it represents a deity’s earthly incarnation. Morningstar used it to describe the onscreen figure that each player — the god in the machine, the deity pulling the strings — would control. That said, her avatar wouldn’t quite be her, at least not all the time, for Morningstar’s world would amongst other things be a space for role play, a space for trying new identities on for size.¹ Whatever else you could say about “avatar,” it at least sounded more dignified than “puppet.”

The project, first dubbed Universe and then MicroCosm, was a hard sell. For some months Steve Case and the others at Quantum remained intrigued but uncertain. The contract wasn’t finalized and signed at last until December of 1985, after QuantumLink itself was already up and running. By this time the name had been changed yet again, this time to simply Habitat. Hoping to make a splash, the new partners rented the Palladium, the hottest new nightclub in New York City, to officially announce the project in mid-1986, despite the fact that there was still lots of work to be done before it could possibly go live. “It was quite an anomaly to have this essentially hip nightclub where people dressed in black… and then all these computer geeks showing off their multiplayer computer games,” admits Steve Arnold. “It was a little bit of a mismatch between PR positioning and target audience.”

Undaunted, Quantum continued to hype Habitat quite heavily in their advertising. It was perpetually “coming soon,” first in the summer of 1986, then in the fall, then at some undetermined point in 1987. An initial spate of intrigued articles in the Commodore trade press dissipated as the months went by and the project started to look more and more like vaporware. Through it all Chip Morningstar struggled to actually build his monster with the help of a partner, another recent Lucasfilm hire named F. Randall Farmer. Only gradually did it dawn on them just what they had gotten themselves into. Making Habitat come alive was going to be hard. Really hard. Farmer has called the Habitat project the most complicated single thing ever done with a Commodore 64. While he’s hardly unbiased, it’s also difficult to think of a more ambitious rival. To help you appreciate Habitat‘s scope, I’d like to give you a description of the experience it was meant to provide for the player.

When you signed up for Habitat, your first task must be to create your new avatar, choosing your sex, your hair color, the shape of your head and your facial features. Your avatar was then given a room of his own to live in, complete with a dresser for storing things and a cat for cuddling. (Yes, dog lovers were out of luck — and no, it wasn’t possible to kill your cat.) You commanded your avatar by moving the cursor about the screen and tapping the joystick button, which yielded a radial menu of four items: “go” (walk to where the cursor points), “do” (manipulate some object or machine to which the cursor points), “get” (pick something up), and “put” (drop something, possibly inside a container). You could, for instance, select “do” over the dresser to open a drawer and reveal its contents, which you could then manipulate via “get” and “put.” Your avatar could normally only carry one thing at a time, but you could use a container, like the handy sack seen in the screenshot above, to carry many more.

The discrete areas, called regions in Habitat terminology, were linked with one another to form a grid or map, like the individual rooms of a text adventure. This, however, was one huge adventure game. There were many thousands of public regions, plus a “Turf Sweet Turf” for every player. By “going” to the door of your home turf, you could access the grand world outside your avatar’s humble abode. It was there that you’d begin to meet others.

Due to technical constraints, only six avatars could occupy a region at the same time, but you could communicate with all of your region-mates simply by typing whatever you liked on the keyboard. The text you typed appeared as comic-style thought bubbles over your avatar’s head for all to read.

And that’s largely all you needed to know in order to interact with Habitat. Yet that’s enough to allow for a huge scope of social possibility, a fact of which Morningstar and Farmer were well aware and of which they were determined to take full advantage. Your room contained a telephone with a functioning telephone number other players could use to call you. Likewise, you could call them by looking them up in a virtual telephone book and dialing. If you preferred the dying art of letter-writing, every avatar had a mailbox before her domicile, with a functioning post system for delivering letters. There was a bank; every player got a stipend of 100 tokens every day she logged in, which she could spend as she would. There was a travel agency and resort destinations to which it could send you, stores to buy clothes and gadgets, bars and galleries and theaters. To facilitate large-scale events like plays, concerts, and poetry readings despite the six-avatars-per-region limit, Lucasfilm implemented something called “ghost mode,” which let you peer into a region without your avatar being actually embodied there — ideal for being a passive member of an audience. There was a “teleport” system for getting around the thousands of regions as quickly and easily as possible, and hotels for overnight trips to far-flung corners of the world. For those needing a definite external goal to work toward, an “Oracle” found in a park near the center of the world assigned adventure-game-like quests: “find the mystic orb of Xebop and return it to the Temple of Zak.” But even they were envisioned as social rather than solitary affairs, often requiring multiple avatars to pull off.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Habitat is that it actually worked at all on a purely technical level, on client machines that Morningstar himself describes as little more than “toys,” with 1 MHz 8-bit processors, 64 K of memory, and an unstable connection running at as slow as 300 baud. The servers that housed this virtual world and managed all of the clients did have a few more resources at their disposal: QuantumLink, and thus Habitat, ran on a cluster of Motorola 68000-based computers built by a company called Stratus. Still, managing a virtual community proved to be far more expensive in both human and computer hours than anyone had anticipated. Lucasfilm’s contract with Quantum called for an environment capable of supporting 20,000 users, with the possibility of scaling it up easily to 50,000 if necessary. By the time the active user base reached 50 employees and insiders, Morningstar admits, Lucasfilm was already starting to feel “over our heads.”

We needed things for 20,000 people to do. They needed interesting places to visit — and since they can’t all be in the same place at the same time, they needed a lot of interesting places to visit — and things to do in those places. Each of those houses, towns, roads, shops, forests, theaters, arenas, and other places is a distinct entity that someone needs to design and create. Attempting to play the role of omniscient central planners, we were swamped.

Morningstar and Farmer nevertheless continued to plug away. In the first weeks of 1988 QuantumLink finally began a public beta test consisting of about 500 players who had been lucky enough to wind up with membership packets containing a special “early-access pass” for Habitat. It’s here that the Habitat story gets really fascinating, as Morningstar and Farmer bring the world’s first massively-multiplayer virtual community fully online. Many of the questions they were soon being forced to address, the situations they confronted, will sound familiar to anyone who’s ever played in Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, or Second Life, or for that matter just read about them. Here, then, are some dispatches from the front of an 8-bit Second Life that lived for just a few months in 1988.

Addiction!

From the bureau of things that never change: some users promptly became addicted, which was a real problem for them given that this was a paid beta test, billed at the usual QuantumLink “premium” rate of $3.60 per hour. Some were soon racking up monthly bills of $200 or more, corresponding to well over 50 hours of play. One managed to hit $1000 in one month, despite warnings sent to his email address at $300 and $600 that he might want to “check out his usage in the billing section.” Horrifying as this was on one level, Lucasfilm and QuantumLink couldn’t help but note that in theory they would only need twenty more users just like him to cover all of their operating expenses and make Habitat profitable.

The One-Percenters

Seeking to make Habitat a believable place, Lucasfilm included richer and poorer areas, discount shops and luxury boutiques with largely the same goods but very different prices. Trouble began when a few players realized that they could actually pawn items in a rich area for more money than it cost to buy them new in a poor. They spent an entire night trekking back and forth, buying low and selling high. By morning they had effectively wrecked Habitat‘s economy, inflating the money supply by a factor of five and making themselves almost inconceivably rich in contrast to everyone else. This nouveau riche began to usurp power for themselves, getting others to do their bidding for trifling (to them) amounts of money, dispensing bread and circuses to the masses in the form of games and treasure hunts. With little outlet for their immense fortunes in spite of all their best efforts to spend them, the superrich ended up establishing a lucrative trade amongst themselves in what became Habitat‘s most ostentatious symbol of conspicuous consumption: custom heads for their avatars.

Robbery! Murder!

Weapons could be purchased in Habitat and player-versus-player conflict was allowed in the so-called “wilderness areas” outside of city limits, although the consequences of “death” were relatively mild: everything the dead avatar was carrying would be dumped onto the ground where she had been standing, and she would then be teleported back to her home turf, once again intact. Of course, it took about five minutes for someone to start randomly shooting people in order to take their stuff. This led to…

Law and Order Must Be Imposed!

The inhabitants decided that a police department must be established, and held elections for sheriff. Inevitably, the guy who won by a landslide was one of the one-percenters, who could afford a campaign on a scale of which the other candidates could only dream. Did someone say something about the role of money in politics?

Christianity Under Siege!

The first virtual church was opened by a Greek Orthodox minister. Those who wanted to join his flock were forbidden from stealing or engaging in any sort of violence. Unfortunately, whenever the minister and his flock weren’t around other players would march in, strip the church bare, and pawn the lot. The minister finally had to appeal directly to Lucasfilm for a special dispensation: a lock for his church.

Family Values

While there is no record of any relationships formed inside Habitat escaping into the real world, there were at least three virtual-world weddings, all taking place in that aforementioned church. Lucasfilm helpfully joined the newlyweds’ turfs together for cohabitation. The first virtual divorce followed the first virtual marriage by just two weeks.

Dangerous Bedfellows

It was possible for players to “sleep over” in other players’ turfs rather than their own, if invited inside. Soon con artists started finagling such invitations from naive players, then logging in while the victim still slept blissfully and absconding with everything in the room.

It’s About Ethics in In-Game Journalism!

A couple of enterprising players founded a newspaper, The Weekly Rant, consisting of as many as fifty pages full of news, fiction, classified advertisements, and announcements (including news of weddings and divorces). Absolutely everyone in Habitat was soon using it as an essential resource until, after a dispute about editorial content — the publisher wanted a shorter newspaper with less fiction — the editor abruptly quit. Habitat felt the loss keenly for all of its remaining days.

Arms Negotiations

For a special area they were creating called “The Dungeon of Death,” two players convinced Lucasfilm to build them special “elephant guns” that could kill another avatar in one shot instead of the usual twelve or so, on the condition that they would use them only in the person of their alter egos “Death” and “The Shadow” who lurked within the dungeon. Embarrassingly, one day while playing Death on loan Randall Farmer himself managed to get himself killed by another player, who promptly scooped up the gun. An ordinary player, unbound by any strictures whatsoever, now had this massively destabilizing weapon in her hot little hands. After threats and negotiations, a deal was struck: 10,000 tokens to buy the gun back. Echoing a thousand Hollywood thrillers, the two parties met on the grounds of Habitat‘s largest public park to make a tense exchange through a neutral intermediary; one can’t help but imagine their respective posses lurking tensely in the bushes all around in case trouble started.

The immediate transplantation of real-world societal structures and, one might say, societal woes into Habitat might be read as depressing. On another level, though, it was a sign that Habitat worked, that it had become a real community. “In a real system that is going to be used by real people,” wrote Morningstar and Farmer later, “it is a mistake to assume that the users will all undertake the sorts of noble and sublime activities which you created the system to enable. Most of them will not. Cyberspace may indeed change humanity, but only if it begins with humanity as it really is.”

In time, Morningstar and Farmer came to categorize the inhabitants of Habitat into five categories that perhaps apply almost equally well to the real world.

The Passive: Easily 50 percent of the number of users fall into this category, but they probably use only 20 percent of the connect time (rough estimates). They tend to show up for events ad-hoc and when the mood strikes. This group must be led by the hand to participate. They tend to want to “be entertained” with no effort, like watching TV.

The Active: This group is the next largest, and made up the bulk of the paying user-hours. The Active user participates in two to five hours of activities a week. They ALWAYS have a copy of the latest paper (and gripe if it comes out late).

The Motivators: The real heroes of Habitat. The Motivators understand that Habitat is what they make of it. They set out to change it. They throw parties, start institutions, open businesses, run for office, start moral debates, become outlaws, win contests.

The Caretakers: The Caretakers are “mature” Motivators. They tend to help the new users, control personal conflicts, record bugs, suggest improvements, run their own contests, officiate at functions, and in general keep things running smoothly.

The Geek Gods: The operator’s job is most important. It really is like being a Greek God from the ancient writings. The Oracle grants wishes and introduces new items/rules into the world. With one bold stroke of the keyboard, the operator can create/eliminate bank accounts, entire city blocks, or the family business. This is a difficult task as one must consider the repercussions of any “external” events to the world. Think about this: would you be mad at “God” if one day suddenly electricity didn’t work anymore? Habitat IS a world. As such, someone should run it that has experience in that area. A Geek God must understand both consistency in fictional worlds and the people who inhabit it.

In the beginning, Morningstar and Farmer tried to micromanage the world, but it quickly became clear that this would be impossible, even with just 500 players. Designing a massively-multiplayer game is a fundamentally different discipline than designing for a single player. A player in a single-player game expects and deserves to have the world revolve around her; a player in a massively-multiplayer game is but one among many would-be heroes. The reality of this difference, a difference which Morningstar and Farmer were amongst the first people in the world to confront, became clear with their first attempt at a large-scale community treasure hunt, the so-called “D’nalsi Island Adventure.” Farmer spent weeks designing and building the quest and the 100-region island that would house its goal, the lost “Amulet of Salesh,” hidden away in a remote, seldom-visited corner of the world. After announcing the quest at a special community meeting held in the county courthouse, Farmer and Morningstar sat back to watch the players go to work, anticipating it would take them some days to return with the amulet. As it turned out, someone found the island within fifteen minutes, then recovered the amulet therein within eight hours. Most players were never even aware that the quest was happening before it was all over.

Clearly, Habitat could not depend on such externally imposed quests, quests which the most knowledgeable and the most powerful were always destined to win. What happened inside Habitat would instead have to be driven by the players themselves. By the time the beta ended, Morningstar and Farmer had shifted their thinking entirely, realizing that the success of this virtual world would depend on them being able to move enough users along each step of the continuum outlined above, from curious but Passive non-participants to Geek Gods who had the competency and the interest to start to play a major role in the underlying workings of the world itself. (One might also say that this is the main goal a real-world society has for each succeeding generation.) From the standpoint of game design, this would prove to be the number-one lesson of Habitat — a sort of transcendence of game design. Morningstar and Farmer made a conscious effort to begin to think more like facilitators than game designers. When players came to them asking for an elephant gun or a church, they asked them what they planned to use it for and, if all seemed kosher, did their best to provide.

And then, just like that, it was suddenly all over. The beta ended and Habitat went dark forever, leaving a million might-have-beens in its wake.  Steve Arnold:

We found that we had pushed the C-64 to its limits, and, if we had to do it all over again — and I’m not trying to insult C-64 owners — we really would have developed the Habitat program on a different system. Once we finished Habitat and really sat down and looked at it, we realized there was a lot more technology needed to do multiplayer gaming — a lot more than we could do effectively on the C-64.

Habitat just didn’t scale well, wasn’t going to work with 20,000 or 50,000 players. In addition to the problems on the client side, Quantum noted that Habitat, even with just 500 players, had already consumed an inordinate amount of processing power on their servers during the beta period. They claimed that trying to deliver a full-scale Habitat would require a massive investment in infrastructure that they just weren’t in a position to pay for.

That said, there were doubtless other factors at play in the mutual reluctance of both Quantum and Lucasfilm to commit yet more resources to making Habitat live for real. They were now well into 1988, and it was becoming clear that the Commodore 64, a computing evergreen for so long, was beginning to fade at last. This reality left neither partner eager to commit more resources to expensive long-range projects for the platform. Lucasfilm was shifting to MS-DOS as their front-line development platform, while Quantum was now pouring most of the revenue they were earning from QuantumLink into new online services targeting other platforms rather than continuing to make major improvements to the old service.

Lucasfilm washed their hands of Habitat in mid-1988 by selling the whole technology package to Fujitsu, who used it to create Club Caribe, a stripped-down environment of a relatively compact 500 regions, on QuantumLink in 1989. It essentially functioned as an amusing chat interface, with most of the elements that made Habitat a real, functioning community stripped away. “Don’t get the idea that Club Caribe is a half-baked attempt to implement a vision that was too far ahead of its time,” wrote one magazine reviewer eager not to lose QuantumLink’s advertising dollars but also not quite willing to completely avoid the truth. That, of course, was exactly what it was, although even as Club Caribe the technology was still more than able to impress those who weren’t aware of the full scope of Chip Morningstar’s original dream. Habitat‘s technology continued to live on to one degree or another in other Fujitsu projects spanning much of the next decade, such as the Habitat Japan that was launched in 1990 and another virtual world called WorldsAway that was launched on CompuServe during that service’s twilight years of the mid-1990s. Yet it wouldn’t be until Ultima Online in 1997 that an online virtual world of quite the same scope and complexity as the original Habitat would be attempted again, and not until Second Life in 2003 that a functioning virtual community of quite the same player-driven character would be dared again. (Second Life also has a more direct connection to Habitat: F. Randall Farmer was a consultant on the later venture.) Such spans are practically millennia in the fast-paced world of computers. Habitat was perhaps doomed to fail from the beginning, but if you’re going to fail you might as well make it a failure for the ages.

QuantumLink, and the Club Caribe to be found within it, persisted as what might be most charitably described as a “legacy service” for a surprisingly long time, not finally going dark until November 1, 1994, just a few days shy of its ninth birthday and after the death of Commodore itself. By that time, however, it was little more than an afterthought for its parent company, now one of the biggest success stories of the nascent Internet boom. After some hiccups in the form of failed AppleLink and PCLink services, you see, Steve Case had finally hit paydirt with America Online, which became the new name of Quantum Computer Services itself in 1991. I’m going to guess that you might have heard of them. If not… well, stick around. We’ll get there.

(Sources: the book Droidmaker by Michael Rubin; Compute!’s Gazette of January 1985, May 1985, March 1986, January 1987, December 1987, and January 1989; Run of August 1986 and November 1989; Commodore Microcomputers of November/December 1986; Computer and Video Games of May 1987. Two episodes of the television show Computer Chronicles, “Modems and Bulletin Boards” from 1985 and “Online Services Part One” from 1987, are pertinent. The Internet Archive gives access to a now-defunct site created by Keith Elkin that was devoted to Habitat. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment’s site hosts a Lucasfilm-to-Fujitsu technology-transfer document dating from the summer of 1988 that’s full of fascinating information and insights. Finally, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer have a website full of still more invaluable information and insights.)

1. Richard Garriott applied the same term to a game even earlier than Morningstar, during the development of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, but his usage applies specifically to the ethical quest that forms the plot of that game: the player’s goal is to become an “avatar of virtue.” The more generalized use of the term in videogames is better attributed to Morningstar, even if Garriott’s usage probably better reflects its real implications in Hinduism. ↩

“It’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the Election.” – Margaret Thatcher, 4 May 1979

“The biggest horror is that the whole world’s becoming suburban. I find it very worrying.” – Norman Mansbridge

COVER

The last thing on anyone at IPC’s mind, when they launched a comic, is that somebody might actually want to keep the thing. Comics were born on the production line, and landfill was their grave, and in that brief span between their urge was not to survive but to reproduce, to impel the reader to buy next week’s issue. So in May 1979 the second issue of Jackpot – “IT’S A WINNER” invited mutilation at front and end. On the cover, a free SQUIRT RING to lure buyers in, mounted with sellotape, which still sticks to my Ebayed copy, covering a gash in the paper like a badly sutured wound. On the back, a coupon to fill in, cut out and hand solemnly over to the newsagent: “PLEASE RESERVE A COPY OF JACKPOT FOR ME EVERY WEEK”.

It’s a loyalty game. There are only so many kids who want to buy comics, and most of those already do. A new title offers a raft of new stories, which may or may not wear better than the ones in the comic you already buy, whose formulae have begun to thin and fray. But with a squirt ring, too – who wouldn’t risk ten pence? Then once you’re snagged, the magazine urges you to the newsagent for next week. You don’t want to miss out.

So it is that the first comic you see in Jackpot No.2 is a three panel, silent strip, admirably clear, instructing you on the use and delight of your squirt ring. Panel 1: a girl shows off her ring to a passing boy. Panel 2: the boy leans in close to admire this fine piece of jewellery. Panel 3: SPLOOSH! A deluge – in the poor sap’s face. HAW HAW!

Reality disappoints. The squirt ring is an ugly lump, it brings no boys to the yard, and the feeble spit of water its bulb holds wouldn’t trouble an ant. Like most cheap pranks, the squirt ring only works if all participants have silently agreed it will – an indulgent Dad, perhaps, leaning in to play the patsy.

This conspiratorial element, this lack of real surprise, is not unique to the squirt ring. To grow up in any culture is to become gradually aware of its web of social relationships, customs, and norms, and of your place in it. Only so much of this awareness can come from direct experience. The rest of the job is done by stories. Fairy tales, comics and cartoons – the first fictions you meet – carry in miniature an implicit social order, or, more rarely, a glimpse of alternatives. We romanticise comics for kids as an escape from reality – an opening of a door into wonder. But to do this they often play a double game, and reinforce reality at the same time. If you want to understand a society, look at its comics.

IPC/Fleetway, publishers in the 70s and 80s of Buster, Jackpot, Cor!, Whizzer And Chips, Knockout, Monster Fun, and dozens of other weekly comics, were not especially interested in alternative social orders. When such things disturbed them in real life – in the form of union action, for instance – the typical reaction was harsh. The existing social order, on the other hand, interested them a great deal. It was their bread and butter. The twenty or so strips making up a typical Fleetway title were social comedies for the under-10s, in which all the hierarchies and absurdities of society might be turned into a gag strip. The status quo might be mocked, but not seriously challenged. The jokes in these social comedy strips, like the squirt ring, work because everyone agrees that they will.

If the cover dates are right, Jackpot’s first issue came out on the day of the 1979 General Election – a genuine challenge to the status quo. I don’t remember the election. I do remember buying Jackpot. It became my comic – ten pence a week, every week, bought with especial loyalty because I’d been in it from the start.

A comic is a machine for understanding society. How does this one work?

RICHIE WRAGGS

The first strip is by Mike Lacey, son of another comics artist, Bill Lacey. British humour strips are identified by artist: scripts were provided by other, nameless freelancers, or often simply worked up in-house. In the case of a new comic with new stories, like Jackpot, the artists might have a hand in the look and feel of the strip – vital, since the plots are so rudimentary.

Most strips are one-pagers, turning on a simple premise. In this case, Richie Wraggs is a poor country bumpkin turned tramp, looking to make his fortune alongside his cat, Lucky. Each week he seems to have fallen on bad luck, but the situation reverses to produce a happy ending and – always temporary – riches.

This episode rests on a laboured pun about “crock” – the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – and “crock” meaning worn out vintage car. This won’t be the last pun we see. You imagine scripters, close to deadlines or the end of their tethers, reaching grimly for a pun in lieu of a plot. That this is the best they can manage two episodes in doesn’t say much for Richie Wraggs’ potential.

Given an idiotic story to work on, Lacey has a decent go. The meandering plot at least means Richie Wraggs shows off many iconic subjects of British comic art. We see cats (a fleabag, naturally), heaps of sausage and mash (the national cartoon food), and accidents involving a pot of paint.

And, of course, yokels. Richie Wraggs talks in West Country shorthand, and is inevitably a dimwit – the rather faithless Lucky provides commentary on his foolishness. His benefactor, an old man in a large fur coat, is upper class and genial. As we’ll see, it’s rare for posh characters in Jackpot to be shown in a good light: presumably the law that country folk are fools is stronger than the law that the upper classes are venal graspers. There is no letters page in Jackpot: if anyone from Richie Wraggs’ part of the country read it, they had no outlet for complaint.

ANGEL’S PROPER CHARLIES

The second strip is by Trevor Metcalfe, an art school graduate who got into comics after his National Service. In title only, it’s a TV spoof – one of the genres British comics ran on. Angel, a young girl, has three boy admirers, her Charlies – each week she beguiles them into helping her with some mischief. This week she wants to get into the Circus without paying.

Jackpot might have been bought by any children, but it’s obviously pitched as a boys’ comic – the majority of protagonists are boys, their friends are generally boys, and so Angels Proper Charlies is unusual. Not just because its lead is a girl, but the central theme of the strip is boys making fools of themselves over a girl. Angel is imaginative and resourceful, but not entirely independent: her job is to manipulate boys with her beauty. With the rather icky job of signifying pre-teen irresistibility, Metcalfe wisely goes for big 70s hair and a big smile: sophistication, not sex. The main audience, I’d guess, was kids with older brothers and sisters, viewing their emergent passions with a pitiless and scornful eye. Still, the message – girls will try to make a chump of you – comes through miserably clear.

For the second strip in a row, the plot involves slipping through a board in a rickety fence.

FULL O’BEANS

The third strip is by Tom Paterson, hired by IPC straight after leaving school. Paterson’s art is immediately more enticing, wilder and more exaggerated, than anything in the comic so far. He’s a follower of Leo Baxendale, creator of the Bash Street Kids for IPC’s great Scottish rival DC Thomson, and probably the single major figure in British humour comics. And you can tell. The physicality, the love of action, and the occasional grotesquerie in Paterson’s style are straight from the Baxendale playbook.

Full O’Beans is a strongman story – a stock “kids with amazing powers” idea. In this case Freddie hulks out when he drains a can of cold beans from his special stash. The plot is beyond basic – a drawer in Fred’s Mum’s dresser is stuck, he uses bean power to open it, wrecks the dresser, then rebuilds it. The focus is all on ludicrous feats and uses of the super strength – like chopping a tree into planks.

Any fences? Yes. Fred and his Mum are poor – their room is damp and peeling – but they live in a detached house with a fenced garden. It will turn out that almost every room in every strip, from office to home to hovel – is drawn this way, full of mildew and old wallpaper. (See story #20, Laser Eraser, for an illustration). A few years before we’d moved house, from a bungalow to a three-bedroom suburban home. Exploring the new home is an early memory. The vacated rooms were as Jackpot describes.

MARATHON MUTT

The fourth strip is by an unknown artist – the only one which I couldn’t find even claimed credit for. Some strips in Jackpot are signed, some aren’t. There’s no consistency, and it’s not as if the big name illustrators get signatures. It’s a shame I can’t find details for Marathon Mutt, as it was a particular favourite.

Partly that was down to the unusual format. Marathon Mutt is a gag strip done as a continuing serial – the adventures of Henry Bono, an anthropomorphised greyhound, who competes in a marathon against other breeds of dogs. Each breed has a gimmick – a sausage dog rolls, a springer spaniel bounces, and so on. The inspiration is obviously Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Races cartoon, a showcase for this mix of slapstick comedy and minor dramatic tension. Back then it was the tension I liked. Now I like the textures of the landscape, which create a rudimentary but welcome sense of place. But Marathon Mutt is out of step with the social comedy of the rest of the comic, even with the cliffhanger it’s a little gentler.

THE TEENY SWEENEY

The fifth strip is by Jack Oliver, one of the younger IPC artists at this stage and another obvious Baxendale disciple – wilder than Paterson, indeed. The story is a TV spoof, more direct this time – its leads are roughly meant to be child versions of Regan and Carter, the heroes of British cop show The Sweeney, which had just finished its TV run, full of hardcase action and car chases. For The Teeny Sweeney, this means an appearance for a staple of British comics, the cartie, a rickety, gravity-defying soapbox cart.

Broadly speaking, the imagined suburbia of Jackpot strips – fences and all – is recognisable from my childhood. The strips are not quite placeless – in this one, our heroes cart their way to a farm, which suggests a more rural backdrop – but generally you can map Jackpot’s landscape onto most towns outside the very inner city. The home-made contraptions of kids’ comics, though – the soapbox carts and catapults – were alien to me. I was too middle-class to have friends who built them? Certainly a possibility – but it also seems likely that in their heyday these gadgets had proved themselves too useful to cartoonists to ever be discarded, visual shorthands for all kinds of outdoor fun.

The gag in this strip involves overhearing a farmer talking about a “kid napping” – the writer usefully including a space, to drain as much humour as possible from the payoff (perhaps you too can guess). Maybe it’s the quality of the material that nudges Oliver into indulging one of British comics’ greatest traditions – filling panels with puns, sight gags, and extras: a disembodied hand marked “FARM HAND”, or the words “CARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW” on the side of the speeding soapbox.

JACK POTT

The sixth strip is by Joe McCaffrey, who learned to draw while at sea with the Merchant Navy. He was in the middle of a long IPC career, creating Jack Pott for an earlier Fleetway title, Cor!! This makes Jack Pott the only strip carried over from any previous comic – IPC in their 60s and 70s prime much preferred to commission new titles and fresh (or re-sprayed) ideas than run reprints.

Jack Pott is a good example of a theme strip. Jack is a kid who wins things. That’s pretty much all there is to it. He’s lucky, or skilful, or a good gambler, depending on the story. It’s not a promising set-up, and prone to disapproval, which is probably why the character had been rested for a few years and wasn’t given top billing despite the comic’s name.

McCaffrey does a fine job here, though. He’s not a chaotic cartoonist in the post-Baxendale mode, instead he cleaves to the jovial, unflashy, direct comic storytelling I think of as the IPC house style. So the strip doesn’t have a lot of visual fizz, but the storytelling is impeccably clear. This is the first story where you don’t need the captions – Jack’s friend challenges him to win a ring-the-bell game at a fairground (another stock setting), and by a bit of luck and slapstick, he does. Two panels have zero dialogue – a sign of trust in a pro, you’d think.

LITTLE ADAM AND EVA

The seventh strip is by Paul Ailey, an artist who mostly ghosted and filled in on other strips, but gets a signature here, on Jackpot’s most bizarre story. Adam and Eva are kids, in a garden, which possesses a tree of knowledge, and a serpent – Serpy! – who is trying to tempt them to eat its fruit, because one particular apple will “spell their downfall”. Luckily, the other apples don’t do this, they just give useful tidbits of info.
Theologically this is an interesting take. Though of course the garden isn’t named – that wouldn’t get past the IPC editors. It’s testament, if nothing else, to IPC’s unshakeable belief that there is no situation you can’t get a strip out of if you make the characters kids.

Serpy is one of the most obscure Satan figures in British comics, and one of the more entertaining, but even more so than Marathon Mutt, Little Adam And Eva is way out of step with the rest of the comic. (I remember rather liking it.) Ailey has an attractive style, light on detail with a nice strong line and bold shading. Unfortunately, the strip gets an extra colour – red – which only emphasises the fact we’re reading a story whose leads spend the entire time naked.

CLASS WARS

The eighth strip is by Vic Neill, who’d mostly worked for Beano and Dandy publishers DC Thomson. He’d modelled his style initially on Dudley Watkins – another great UK comics figure, creator of the Broons and Oor Wullie. Watkins’ art was rooted in strong storytelling, an unusual degree of detail and a great repertoire of comic faces. On Class Wars, Neill offers a more streamlined version with touches of Baxendale grotesque. It works well – the story’s two pages hardly need their dialogue.

The strip title is pun intended. This is the first story where Jackpot’s social comedy turns into conflict. it’s a school strip (every mag had at least one) with the tension coming from a mixed class of working-class scruffs and stuck-up posh kids, thrown together when a private school is forced to merge with a comprehensive. A burly teacher acts as referee. In this story, the scruffs are doing their best to pelt their posh classmates with mud.

The resolution here is wildly unfair – eventually the teacher, treated with contempt by the scruffs and obsequious but patronising regard by the posh kids, gets hit by mud himself and gives everyone a cross-country run as punishment. But the strip knows better than to go against the social coding of decades of kids’ comics: tearaways have more fun, snobs don’t, so the snobs have to get their come-uppance in the end.

Except Class Wars is a much more conservative story than it might look. The outcome may be unfair, but the codes of behaviour are absolutely clear. Working class kids in this story are lazy, thuggish, and hate learning. Their moneyed counterparts are prigs, but hard-working and resourceful. Within the standard knockabout of the class-tension storyline, resolved as usual when authority intervenes, lurk some very nasty stereotypes.

GREMLINS

The ninth strip is by Steve Bell, a former art teacher, briefly stopping over at IPC en route to spending 30+ years drawing the If… newspaper strip for the Guardian. Bell’s style is still in development but it’s recognisably him – the fleshy roundness of his characters with their bulging noses; the toothy black blots that are the titular Gremlins, agents of mischief and malfunction in an ordered world.

Bell, a young cartoonist, is firmly in with the post-Baxendale wing of Jackpot, and while he’s not as extreme as some he’s inherited Baxendale’s love of disorder. The Gremlins exist to make things go wrong, Bell exists to depict the consequences as entertainingly as possible. The strip builds toward a single large, chaotic panel as a gremlin-infected shopping trolley goes wild in a supermarket. Nothing is resolved – the human leads can only flee as the shopkeeper shouts “GRRRRRRR!!”. There’s a gleeful chaos here quite unlike anything we’ve so far seen – order is not restored, and the gremlins represent the unpredictable and unaccounted for in Jackpot’s comic suburbia.

THE INCREDIBLE SULK

The tenth strip is by Jim Petrie, a DC Thomson lifer, who drew 2000 episodes of Minnie The Minx. The Incredible Sulk was rare IPC work for him, and he’s obviously enjoying drawing in a rather looser style: the strip plays with panel borders as a component of the story, a common trick now but unusual in this era. As Sulk’s rage builds, the edges of panels distort and their composition gets stranger – at the height of his anger, Sulk is barely on-panel, racing out the back and the front of panels, so angry he wants to break out of the strip.

These elemental tantrums made Sulk one of the comic’s biggest hits – never mind the very repetitive nature of the strip, this is pure wish fulfilment, a kid not only losing his cool (as they all do) but getting utterly away with it. As in Gremlins, the strip cuts out with chaos firmly in the ascendant. But here it’s a more relatable human chaos. I don’t know if Petrie was doing the stories as well as the art – there’s definitely a sense he’s being given a much longer leash than most of the artists, and he’s using it to the fullest.

GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS

The eleventh strip is by Nigel Edwards, more prolific in the 80s for IPC – this may be his first gig, in fact. He’s yet another in the looser, Baxendale mode – his hero is a cheerful grotesque, and the liberal use of sound effects (“PONG! REEK! WAFT! GASP!”) shows the desire to cram as much comic detail into the strip as possible. Edwards would become a major contributor to OINK!, the last doomed triumph of the Baxendale style, a scatological “Junior Viz” of the mid-80s which goaded the censorious elements in British society and quite swiftly fell to them.

Back in 1979, this is one of the more unusual Jackpot strips, a formalist conceit, with a twist in every panel. Good news and bad news alternate – each situation is either complicated or resolved one panel on. The result, inevitably, is a strip that’s much denser than the average, with no panels wasted. A perfect fit for Edwards’ style, and it was a favourite of mine at the time. But it’s also slightly exhausting, a rigid fever pitch of action, laying bare the principles of rapid comic development that every one-page humour strip is discreetly obeying anyway.

KID KING

The twelfth strip is by Reg Parlett, son of an illustrator and postcard artist, and an IPC stalwart – he’d been at the company since 1923 and had over a decade’s work still in him at this point. As the excellent site Toonhound points out, it’s astonishing nobody had come up with this strip’s concept before – the ultimate fulfilment of the “kids do grown-up jobs” genre, a British comic staple. What job is more important than a King?

Kid King is a fantasia of absolute childishness rubbing shoulders with the absolute pomp of adulthood. All through this episode, kids invited to play in Kid King’s palace constantly think the guards are going to kick them out (or mow them down!). In fact they’re handing out toffee apples and lollipops – a carnival inversion straight out of the hippie imagination. But Play Power, or any kind of power, isn’t on display here: the strip is never about mocking the monarchy or its trappings, just about how fun it might be to have them as your toybox.

Parlett’s bold, fluid line is a great fit for the story – he’s a master of body language, revelling in the contrast between the loose-limbed Kid King and his stiff-backed retinue. Body motion in a lot of Jackpot strips feels rather overdone – a lot of windmilling arms, leaping, kicking to swiftly diminishing effect. Parlett, wisely, keeps it simple.

IT’S A NICE LIFE

The thirteenth strip is also by Reg Parlett, and it’s Jackpot’s colour centrefold. Jackpot’s palette is basic but very lurid – ultra bold yellows, reds, and greens with little mixing. This isn’t the best fit for Parlett’s art. His style is smooth, leading the eye easily from panel to panel – the colouring slows it down, even wrecks some gags. A three panel sequence of Stanley Nice trying to yoke pigs to a plough loses all detail: just not enough contrast between pigs, mud, and Stan’s jumper.

It’s A Nice Life is the most clanking of all Jackpot’s TV spoofs. It’s a comic remake of massively successful BBC sitcom, The Good Life, with the main tweak being that both the eco-friendly “self-sufficient” Nice family and their stuck up neighbours have kids. Not the only tweak, though. The Good Life was a gentle satire on both suburban aspiration and alternative lifestyles, with both families roughly on the same rung of the social ladder.

It’s A Nice Life is less ambitious. Satire isn’t the aim – the set-up is just an excuse for more on that favourite IPC theme, the class struggle. Stanley Nice and his family live in a caravan. Next door is a large private home with not just a car in the drive but a private motorboat. Whatever the origins of this pair’s rivalry, by its second episode the irresistible rhythms of the IPC class conflict strip have asserted themselves.

The stereotypes are more one-sided than Class Wars. Stan himself is just a twinkle-eyed cheeky chap. His rich neighbours – like the earlier strip’s posh kids – have a love of consumption and a horror of dirt. Naturally the strip ends with them ploughing their neighbour’s muddy fields with their precious new bicycles. (“HOW DEGRADING!”) Below the gag is a very 20th century bourgeois nightmare – to be stripped of your assets and put to work farming: a suburban Cultural Revolution, played for laughs.

Not that Mao was on the minds of the IPC scriptwriters – though with the pressure to crank out pages to fill a half dozen titles, you took your ideas as they came. But it’s emblematic of social relations as they play out across Jackpot’s strips. The world of Jackpot accepts that class struggle is axiomatic. But it also accepts that this is eternal – its class war is also a cold war, resetting, week upon week, to comic stalemate. No outcome to the class struggle is ever in prospect. The toffs would always despise the toughs, and vice versa – such were the facts of life. In which case best to have fun with them. This, if anywhere, is where the comic reflects the consensus politics of mid-century Britain, which ended the week Jackpot began.

LITTLE AND LARGE LENNY

The fourteenth strip is by Norman Mansbridge, a former political cartoonist, of no strong party opinion, who had turned to kids’ strips in his retirement. His speciality as illustrator and comic artist was suburbia, and he spoke of his growing realisation that the orderly jollity of suburban existence often masked cramped, neurotic lives. His great contribution to British humour comics was Whizzer & Chips’ Fuss Pot, one inspiration for The Incredible Sulk: a girl whose unstoppable tantrums drove her respectable suburban parents to despair. The repression and selfishness of suburban life made manifest.

Since almost all of Jackpot’s strips are set in an undefined semi-suburbia of fences, busy streets and neat lawns, Mansbridge is an obvious fit. Unfortunately, he’s saddled with an uninspired kids-with-powers strip. Lenny can grow big and small, and uses the power to discomfit a grouchy suburban hoarder of lost footballs – yet another stock strip character and crime. Size-changing is one of the great gifts to comic illustrators, a ready-made excuse to have fun with perspective, which Mansbridge does. But I’m not surprised this is one of the Jackpot strips I didn’t remember.

CRY BABY

The fifteenth strip is the second by Mike Lacey, artist on Richie Wraggs. In rare interviews with IPC script veterans, former writers explained the firm’s methods. Artists would stick with a strip for a long time, while the uncredited writers would often be rotated to keep them fresh. Run out of ideas for Jack Pott? Have a go on Kid King! Inspiration proved easier with some strips than others. Writers particularly cursed “Sid’s ****ing Snake”, a flagship Whizzer & Chips strip about a boy and a giant serpent. Notoriously stony ground for ideas, let alone laughs, yet too popular with the readers to ever ditch.

Cry Baby does not strike me as a strip with legs. It’s a cross between the Incredible Sulk subgenre of tantrum wish fulfilment and the amazing powers strip. Tina has the mutant power of producing literal floods of tears. In this strip her nervous suburban parents put her into a wetsuit and bathtub before obtaining – how? – a sea rescue raft, which she fills with tears and uses as a swimming pool. It’s a strange story. You can imagine kids fantasising about getting their own way, but incessant crying? Part of the point, though, is the pantomime of parental anxiety: “OH NO! YOU’LL SOAK OUR NEW CARPET!” And there’s something primal and powerful about how terrified the parents are of their daughter’s emotion and its potential to wreck their home and possessions.

This feels like a good place to point out that everyone credited or claimed as working on Jackpot is a man.

THE TERROR TOYS

The sixteenth strip is the first whose scripter we can identify. It’s Tom Tully, an old school IPC action writer who did a lot of sports story work. By 1979 Tully’s long career was winding down, but The Terror Toys is a re-edit of a 1960s strip, The Toys Of Doom. At four pages long it’s double the length of anything else in the comic, and is also dead serious – a sudden insertion of action into the humour format, varying the tone. It worked on me: I was hooked by the story of tiny, deadly toy soldiers and murderous bears – one scene, where a child was attacked by toy battleships in his bath, gave me nightmares.

If Tully’s identifiable, the artist is trickier. The drawing is pitched older than the other strips – more realism, more shadow, more detail in the background, and less of the kind of art an older, sillier me would learn to disdain as “cartoonish”. It’s a solid, old-fashioned action comic: two kids stumble upon the plans of a grotesque toymaker, but neither adults nor their peers will believe them. (Their tactics involve smashing up kids’ brand new toys, not a great dialogue starter.)

The internet suggests either Argentine great Solano Lopez – best known, at least by Google, for his porno comic Young Witches – or an artist from his studio. To complicate matters bits of the strip have been redrawn as well as edited. Still, the thick, Raggedy Ann style hair on the kids reminds me of the cheap, stylish South American artists IPC habitually used on their older boys’ comics, even if it looks nothing like Lopez.

The Terror Toys has little to do with the rest of Jackpot: even though I loved it, it was a few years before I read adventure stories for preference. I’m a little sad to learn it was a reprint – its thrills age six felt purely mine – but not surprised. Whoever drew it, their reference might have been stills from any 30s or 40s British film, even one set fifty years before that. This is an incursion from a foggier, creepier old England than the merry suburbs of Jackpot standard.

TERRY AND GAVIN’S FUNTASTIC JOURNEY

The seventeenth strip is by Ian Knox, who’d trained as an architect, but at this point was doubling a job drawing kids’ comics with a role as “Blotski”, the political cartoonist for Red Weekly and Socialist Challenge. Perhaps fearing his revolutionary potential, IPC have given him the comics’ least earthbound strip, a surrealist fantasy in which a pair of children and a crazy professor take to the skies in a “Welly-copter” and visit one absurdist land a week.

Of all the Jackpot strips, this feels one of the most old-fashioned – maybe it’s the Welly-copter itself, as the comic potential of the welly boot was an article of misplaced faith when I was small. Or maybe I’ve just never clicked with this brand of zany fantasy, whose unlikely events seem arbitrary in the way the handy life rafts and passing vintage cars of other strips never quite do. It doesn’t help that the kids rely on their adult friend to get things done – mostly because it turns the second half of the strip into exposition, but also because Knox can’t seem to nail perspective and get the height ratio of kids and grown-ups consistent. (In fairness, he’s dealing with a magic land where everything floats, which is a bugger to establish distance and direction in).
There’s an irony, too, that of all the strips to suffer from Jackpot’s elephant-gun approach to colouring, it’s Blotski’s that arrives absolutely doused in red.

MILLY O’NAIRE AND PENNY LESS

The eighteenth strip is by Sid Burgon, a former mechanic whose co-workers encouraged him into a career drawing. He drew for some of 70s IPC’s most popular strips – like Ivor Lott And Tony Broke in Buster, of which this is a sister strip. If it wasn’t obvious from the title, this is, yet again, a class conflict story. Unlike in It’s A Nice Life, there’s no TV spoof to provide a pretext. The set-up is very simple, though. Milly O’Naire – who lives in Moneybags Mansion – is rich but vain and mean. Penny Less is poor but ingenious. Penny wants something from Milly, and each week works out a way to get it.

This is a strip you could imagine Blotski getting his teeth into. It opens with Penny Less and her family, reduced to eating stale bread. She goes to Milly’s mansion only to find her serving banquets to her pet ostriches, who peck Penny off the grounds. There’s no camaraderie here, and none of the hidden stereotypes of Class Wars: Milly is nakedly hostile to her poor counterpart, and is unequivocally the villain. And the resolution finds workers occupying Milly O Naire’s grounds until she pays them to go away.

This is the most accomplished and satisfying of Jackpot’s class struggle strips, and Burgon is one of the definitive IPC house style artists, with his chunky backgrounds, fluid line and rock-solid storytelling. When I think of reading IPC titles as a kid, it’s Burgon’s art I see. But Milly O’Naire And Penny Less is thoroughly of its time. It gives zero ground in assuming the rich are venal and callous, and the poor are quick-witted and deserve a slice of the wealth. To use a modern term, the strip “punches up”, however cheerily. And even though it’s a kind of pantomime punch-up, one centuries old, with no suggestion that the social positions it depicts could ever change, it’s impossible to imagine a humour strip like this getting made now, partly because the country sneers at families living on stale bread, who are nobody’s heroines. Meanwhile a rich girl feeding cake to her pet ostriches might land a reality show or a record deal.

But this was one of Jackpot’s most popular stories, just like Ivor Lott And Tony Broke (identical save gender) was in Buster. The kids culture of the IPC comics rippled with social and class anxiety, and readers loved it.

SCOOPER

The nineteenth strip is our second by Tom Paterson, seen already on Full O’Beans. This is a much richer, more lovingly presented piece by him, crammed with details and full of a joyous grubbiness. Everything is dusty, run-down, grotty, but gloriously material. Paterson’s focus here is on expressive characters, particularly Scooper’s jowly, well-intentioned but incompetent Dad, whose nervous eagerness never lets up.

Scooper is a kids-doing-adult-jobs strip on journalistic lines, with Scooper the son of a local paper reporter. He goes out with his Dad to take pictures – which end up turning out to be of Dad screwing up. It’s a strong, flexible premise that means a huge range of things for Paterson to draw (this week it’s dogs). Notwithstanding a slightly flat script, Scooper is excellent.

And there’s something pleasing about one of the best stories in the comic being so low-concept: built on faith that a local paper beat is a place where funny things might happen. The one-line biographies of artists I’ve been giving suggest the range of backgrounds Jackpot drew its creative staff from – but one thing most of them, and surely their writers, shared was some immersion in journalism. Perhaps that accounts for the extra care Scooper seems to enjoy.

LASER ERASER

The twentieth strip is by Robert Nixon, an art school associate of Mike Lacey and similar in his clean and simple style – certainly on the ‘IPC house’ side of things. The strip knows the virtue of getting off to a brisk start: “EEK! HELP! ESCAPED GORILLA!” are the first words you see. “COR!” says our hero Ernie, and in panel two he’s zapped it into nothingness with the strip’s eponymous device.

The Laser Eraser can make things vanish from one place and return in another (the gorilla reappears and squashes a couple of crooks who steal the gadget). Nixon is a compact storyteller with a particularly good line in facial expressions, which works with the breakneck plot to make Laser Eraser feel a dense, good-value strip. The Eraser itself is a scripter’s gift – as long as you can think of a reason to have anything you like appear, you can use the Eraser to drop it into any other scene, creating the surreal combinations IPC strips thrive on with no plot strain.

ROBOT SMITH

The twenty-first and final strip is by Ken Reid, one of the great names of British comics, who created Roger The Dodger and died at his board still drawing an episode of signature strip Faceache. Reid’s faces made his reputation – clean-lined, detailed, but always entertainingly contorted – and his strip has a different feel from anything else in the comic. More old-fashioned, somehow – for all the 70s realism of the PE teacher’s trackie and combover.

Part of that old-school feel comes from the storytelling. Reid was famous enough to write his own strips, and Robot Smith is the work of a man steeped in their form and formulae. A situation is established in the first panel, resolved in the last, and in between is a series of simple sight gags. This episode – Robot tries out for the football team – could have been a Ken Reid strip from any time since the 40s. Even the premise – a robot goes to school – is like something out of a Charles Hamilton school story, and Robot Smith’s rivet-studded jumper and spring-driven legs are just as archaic. Next to the wild, Baxendale-style strips which represent the young generation of Jackpot, Reid uses startling amounts of white space, and lays out his panels with geometric fussiness. Robot Smith sticks out, but it’s a living reminder of the traditions the rest of Jackpot has built on.

TO THE NEWSAGENT

That’s the end of the stories. The inside back cover has the coupon for the newsagent (with a Marathon Mutt illustration) and the Jackpot Top 20 League Ladder, which you can fill in to create a top of the Jackpot pops.

Which means it’s time to think about what isn’t in Jackpot. Two things stick out as absent.

The first is pop culture references, scrupulously avoided by the IPC writers, in this mag at least. All through these write-ups I’ve commented on the texture of the strips – how familiar some of it feels, how distant in other ways. Jackpot is pitched at ‘everyone’, and as is often the way, everyone turns out to mean an imaginary middle: middle-class, suburban, aware of the poor and the rich and the rural, but at a distance, as exotic and comical elements. You can recognise 1979 in the comics, but only those broad outlines. With the large but specific exceptions of the TV spoof strips, the pop cultural texture of the time is missing: no punks, wookies, time lords, footie fans, disco dancers. A section of life, kept at arms’ length.

The second absence is more glaring now. Every face – every excited schoolboy, enraged official, idiot posho, hapless parent, everyone – is white. This was what parts of Britain looked like in 1979, of course. But only parts. Britain had welcomed – a mixed welcome, often – thirty years of Commonwealth immigrants; two hundred years of Empire before that had left the country more diverse than its xenophobes would have you think. My home was in a leafy, middle-class suburb, not too far off It’s A Nice Life territory, and I was at school with kids from families from India, Pakistan, Uganda, Ethiopia. The Britain that Jackpot presented was a plain lie. In May 1979 parts of the world it drew, and drew laughter from, were ending. But in important ways they had never really been.

BACK COVER

“Published every Thursday by I.P.C. Magazines Limited, King’s Reach Tower, Stamford Street, London SE1 9LS”. This was the start of a long, one-way association between my pocket money and Kings’ Reach Tower. First Jackpot, then Buster, then Eagle, then 2000AD, and finally the NME. IPC had me from cradle to rave. I can appreciate now what I didn’t then – that it was a somewhat sclerotic operation, prone to censorious fits, conservative in subtle ways despite all the outward fizz of its magazines. But their editors had a good nose for talent, however poorly they treated it.

It seems clear, looking back at this comic, that the IPC kids’ line was firmly artist-driven, and that the company was happy to pull in freelancers of any age and a range of styles. That’s the most admirable thing about Jackpot – the sense of a pack of different artists, of no one dominant style. The gonzo fleshiness of Steve Bell and Nigel Edwards; the loose line and tight storytelling of Reg Parlett or Robert Nixon; the grimy detail of Tom Paterson; the open spaces and weird faces of Ken Reid. It wasn’t something I noticed at the time – aged six, you bought for characters, not for art – but unconsciously maybe it filtered through, gave me a feel for variety. The flipside is that the scripts were often pitiful, insultingly lazy, a half-baked pun often built out into a whole page. The better artists kicked against that, by quality of storytelling or just a riot of detail. The others just drew it, and no doubt hoped for something better next week.

Next week, though! “DOUBLE TREAT”, the back cover says. A “magic numbers” card game and the covers of a cut out partwork – “WHY BE BORED?”. The last of the free gift cycle Fleetway would permit a new launch. Three weeks in and it would have to walk by itself. It did, until 1982 at least. Then the cull came.

IPC’s policy with its comics was notorious: hatch, match, dispatch. Launch a new title, if it failed, find an existing one to pair it with, and put the weaker to death. The readers would be given a weeks’ warning – “Great news for our readers inside!”. In Jackpot’s case, the host – and the eventual last survivor of the IPC line – was Buster, which inherited a range of strips.

Laser Eraser, the most leggy of the gimmick strips, made it over. So did Jackpot’s first black lead, when he eventually arrived: he was called Sporty, and was “good at sport”. A score-draw for progress. Terror Toys got yet another reprint. And all three of the class conflict strips – Class Wars; Milly O’Naire And Penny Less; and It’s A Nice Life – survived. Nice Life could pivot easily from a strip about hippies to a strip about yuppies. Ingenious Penny Less got a scholarship to a private school in 1986 – Milly O’Naire’s Dad went broke paying the fees. As for Class Wars, it hung on until May 1987, from Thatcher’s first election win to her last. But by then things had changed. The strip left Jackpot behind it with a more 80s title: “Top Of The Class”.

All illustrations copyright IPC Publications

NEXT: Under the shadow of the slipper – a closer look at DC Thomson and the Beano.

I always hear people who've "made it" (in whatever field) tell folks who haven't: "Never give up. If you keep pursuing your dream, eventually you will succeed." This, I do not buy. I mean, it's a lovely thought — like marriages are forever and good always triumphs over evil — but it's just not so. Bet you can name twenty people who will do everything humanly possible to become President of the United States but will never spend one night in the White House.

I explained more about my viewpoint on this back here and in other posts. Right now, I want to tell you a story about someone I knew who never "made it." A few of you reading this will recognize who I'm talking about and if so, please keep it to yourself. I'm posting this to enlighten others, not to humiliate him…and I'm going to call him Harlow.

Harlow wanted very badly to be a famous cartoonist but I don't think his dream really included the part where you sit at a drawing table for twelve hours a day and draw, draw, draw. Whenever we talked about his goals, he seemed to only be interested in the part where he makes a lot of money and people say, "Hey, there goes a famous cartoonist." He idolized people like Jack Kirby and Milton Caniff but never grasped a key element of their success. Those two men worked their butts off for their entire lives.

So right there, I thought he had a basic misunderstanding of the career he sought. That alone can be fatal to most goals in life.

He didn't give up but he also didn't try very hard to improve his work. He half-heartedly signed up for a few classes and missed half of them. He didn't spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sketching like most artists need to do to get good. He'd just sit down, dash off a drawing every so often…then he'd wait for someone to throw money at him for it. This never happened.

I also thought there was another obstacle to him achieving his career objective: He was a terrible artist.

If he had tried harder, he would have been better but how much better, we'll never know for sure. My hunch is that he'd never have been great and might not even have ever gotten good enough to have a real career in the field. I further suspect that deep down, he may have known that and not seen the point of working harder at it.

His hope was that somehow — he had no likely idea how — he'd land a high-paying cartooning job and then he could hire talented assistants to do all the work. This was not entirely without precedent and here's one example of many: After Bud Fisher launched his newspaper strip, Mutt & Jeff, he hired ghosts to put in all those hours at the board. One of them — Al Smith — wrote and drew it for 48 years. As long as Fisher was alive, Smith did it all including the part where he signed "Bud Fisher" on every strip.

Harlow more or less hoped to emulate Fisher but there was a fundamental flaw in that plan: Bud Fisher did have the talent to draw the strip. He wrote and drew it for several years before handing it off to assistants. He made it successful enough that he could afford assistants. Harlow couldn't have done the first part which meant he never could have gotten to the second part.

Still, he tried and tried to break into cartooning work. He had a portfolio of samples which he forced upon anyone he thought might be able to hire him or recommend him to someone for work. When he thrust it before my eyes, I tried — honest, I tried — to think of somewhere in the cartooning world where there might be a place for him. I could not come up with one. This, alas, did not stop Harlow from trying to get work on a recommendation from me.

One day, he went to the Los Angeles offices of Western Publishing Company, which were then located on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across the street from the famed Chinese Theater. Western published many kinds of publications but he was mainly interested in the Gold Key Comics line, half of which was edited out of that office. The other half were edited in the firm's New York office. L.A. did comics like Tarzan, Woody Woodpecker, Scooby Doo, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Woodsy Owl, Pink Panther and all the Disney titles as well as many, many more. I was writing many of them at the time.

There would later be some disagreement as to how he represented himself there that day. Del Connell, an editor for Western who agreed to see him, said that he announced he was a friend of Mark Evanier and that I had sent him with my highest recommendation. Harlow later swore to me that he had merely mentioned he was a friend of Mark Evanier…which I guess was true. Del — a trusting soul — did not call me to check and see if what he heard Harlow say I'd said was what I'd said. I had not said that.

Del looked at his samples and decided Harlow was nowhere near qualified to draw or ink or even letter for their comics. This was true. Still, the guy seemed so eager…or maybe so needy. And there was one job Del had open at that moment…

Western was then publishing a few comics in digest format. Most of what was in them was reprints of material done for conventional-sized comics and that presented a problem. You couldn't just shrink an entire page drawn for a regular-size comic book down to the size of a digest comic page. They tried that for a time and realized the images were too small and the lettering was way too small. Also, the proportions of the pages did not match up.

So what they began doing was to have two sets of stats made of each of the old stories they wanted to reprint in digest format. They were reduced to two different sizes. Someone would then take these stats and repaste the panels in a new layout. They would take the artwork and rearrange it to fit the digest format, putting fewer panels on each page. A story that was 12 pages in the original format might be 16 or 18 pages in digest format.

They might take the images (as opposed to the lettering) in a given panel from either of the two sets of stats but they would take the word balloons wholly off one set so the lettering would be of a consistent size throughout. They'd rearrange that which needed rearrangement and paste all this up and it would then be necessary to do some minor art here and there, extending the background of a drawing or finishing a figure. Also, the rearranger would have to draw new panel borders around each panel.

If my explanation confuses you — and it would sure confuse me — take a look at the image below. It may explain things far better than I can here. On the left is a page as it ran in a comic book with the conventional page dimensions. At right is a portion of the material on that page reconfigured for a digest page. Note how someone drew in a few little things that weren't there before…

Click above to enlarge.

Okay, so it was mostly a cut-and-paste job but it did require some minor artistic skill to reposition images and to fill in a bit of minor drawing here and there and to rule new panel borders. Del decided to give Harlow a shot at this. They were at that moment preparing an issue of Walt Disney Comics Digest that would be all Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories by the great man himself, Carl Barks. Del explained to Harlow in great detail what had to be done. Then he gave him the stats to one Donald Duck story and sent him on his way with a one-week deadline.

Harlow was in heaven. He was a professional artist working in comic books…and on a Carl Barks story, no less.

Others who had done such work for Western could have done the job in a few days. Harlow took three weeks, most of which was spent coming up with other things he had to do before he could tackle the assignment…like, say, go to the movies. Finally though, he turned in the finished job. Del pronounced it utterly unusable.

The paste-ups were sloppy. The panel borders were shaky and blotchy. The places where he had to extend Barks' artwork were obvious because Harlow's linework didn't come close to matching what Barks had done. Del only had to look at the first page to realize that the whole job had to be redone by someone else.

As he paged through the rest of it, he got angry. He had explicitly told Harlow to extend Barks' drawings as necessary but not to change them in any other way. Harlow had done little additions and changes to the figures themselves, adding a new pattern on someone's shirt or adding gratuitous hair to some character's head. In one spot, he had added eyelids on Donald Duck, changing the facial expression Barks had drawn.

This was Carl Barks, widely hailed as the best artist who ever drew these characters…the creator of some of them. Harlow, an absolute beginner, had decided to "improve" Barks.

Harlow had also hidden his name on almost every page, writing it in on signs in the background or as graffiti on walls. Carl's name appeared nowhere on the story but Harlow's appeared in about fourteen places.

Del told Harlow that the job was unacceptable. They would not use it. He would not pay for it.

Harlow responded by screaming and crying.

Here, roughly, is how Del described it to me on the phone two minutes after he got Harlow out of his office: "I told him I wouldn't pay him for it and he began yelling and having some sort of breakdown. Everyone else in the office rushed in to see what was wrong. He started crying about how he wanted to be a cartoonist all his life and everybody was conspiring to deny it to him and how I was the latest one and he was not going to put up with us doing it to him any longer!

"I finally agreed to pay him half as a kill fee just to be rid of him. Zetta filled out the forms to pay him and then he left." Zetta DeVoe was the Associate Editor and Office Manager. She later confirmed Del's account to me as did others who worked there.

That phone conversation from Del to me had started with him saying, "Mark, that guy you sent me really screwed up the job I gave him." To which I replied, "What guy I sent you?" That's when Del told me Harlow had said he had my recommendation.

I told Del, "I wish you'd checked with me because I never sent him to you" and Del admitted that, yes, he should have done that. Before the call ended, I told him, "If you need someone to paste up digest pages, I can send you someone I do recommend."

I got off with Del and called a friend of mine named Rick Hoppe. Rick is now a top animator who's worked on Disney films and others but at the time, he was a beginning artist with more talent than most long-time professionals. He ran up to Del's office and picked up the stats to another Barks story that was slated to run in the same digest. He took the job home, repasted everything and I went in with him two days later when he delivered it. Del said what he did was perfect. No changes necessary.

Rick wound up doing that kind of work — and other, more complicated assignments — for Western Publishing until others started offering him far better art jobs. The third or fourth assignment he got from Del was to totally redo the Barks story that Harlow had ruined. Del ordered up two new sets of stats and Rick repasted them using none of what Harlow had done.

Harlow and I discussed the whole incident twice. The first time was the evening after Del called to tell me my "recommendation" had flopped. Harlow swore to me he had not said I'd recommended him. He also insisted he did a perfectly fine, professional job and that Del had said what he'd said in order to try and cheat him out of his fee. He was proud that he stood up to Del and got half of it.

Eight to ten months later, I was at a weekend comic convention that was held in a hotel up in Universal City. Harlow was present and he came up to me and asked if I knew if the issue of Walt Disney Comics Digest with his work in it was out yet. The digests had odd distribution and were very hard to find in some areas. I got my copies in the bundles I picked up at the office.

I told Harlow that the issue in question had gone on sale a few weeks earlier but his repasting job had been redone by someone else. He did not believe me and he went off to find a dealer in the room who had copies. Several did and Harlow bought every copy he could find on the premises.

He told me — like I was stupid enough to fall for that lie about his work being unacceptable — that it was definitely his paste-up. "They took out my name in all the places where I put it but I recognize all my little additions and changes."

The person I'm calling Harlow is no longer with us. To his dying day though, he refused to believe that his work had not been printed. Not only that but on his résumé, he listed it as a credit, phrasing it like he was Carl Barks's collaborator. He did not even indicate that he was referring to, at most, one reprint. If you read what he wrote, you might have thought that all those great Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books were drawn in the first place by Carl Barks and Harlow.

That wasn't the only credit on that résumé. Through sheer persistence, he got a few others — some, even real. Sadly — and I really mean that — at no point did he ever get near a living wage in the cartooning profession. There was never a moment when someone pointed his way and said, "Hey, there goes a famous cartoonist," which was the main thing he wanted. I know I felt bad for the guy but I was never sure if it was because he didn't get what he wanted or because he wasted so much of his life trying to attain the unattainable.

I told this story here because at Comic-Con last week, an aspiring writer asked me for some advice and I quoted my oft-offered belief — I'm sure I've said it on this blog and more than once — that to become a writer or actor or almost anything of a "glamorous" nature, one must find the sweet spot between Idealism and Pragmatism and not have an excess of either.

The newbie seeking my counsel instantly understood what I meant by an excess of Pragmatism. You don't get far by limiting yourself to what you absolutely know is possible. He asked me for an example of Too Much Idealism and I started to tell him the Harlow story then said, "Wait. I'll post it on my blog after I get home from the con and sleep for at least three days." Today is Thursday so there you have it.

I really believe in this concept I came up with — at least, I think I came up with it — about the balance of Idealism and Pragmatism. Everyone I've ever known who has failed has had too much of one and not enough of the other. You can't achieve a dream if you don't have one…but you also can't succeed in the real world without having at least one foot in the real world. Harlow had about half his little toe in there, maybe less.

The post The Unknown Assistant of Carl Barks appeared first on News From ME.

Hundreds of Westernised young men who grew up in Britain after fleeing war-torn Afghanistan as children have been forcibly returned to their home country due to what experts believe is an inhumane shortcoming in the UK asylum system. 

The Bureau has established that in the past six years 605 individuals who had arrived unaccompanied in the UK as asylum-seeking children were deported to Afghanistan after their temporary leave to remain ran out on turning age 18. Hundreds of others are still in Britain awaiting a similar fate. 

Those deported often spent several years in Britain learning impressive English, going to school, playing cricket, taking GCSEs and A-levels, and forming close bonds with new friends and foster families. 

But they are wrenched from their new lives and frequently placed terrified on special charter flights, sometimes in handcuffs, to a country they no longer know, that many experts regard as dangerous – and with little support and money from the UK government.

FILE - This Oct. 9, 2014, file photo shows the gurney in the the execution chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Okla.  (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)

A long-time associate and mentor to President Obama says the president is "close" to opposing the death penalty but not quite there yet -- and needs to be pushed to do it.

"He's not there yet, but he's close, and needs some help," said Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., a law professor at Harvard University and prominent death penalty opponent who taught the president and First Lady Michelle Obama when both were students there. The legal scholar said he was planning on meeting with his former student next month and would confront him about the issue then.

As Obama has increasingly confronted racial disparities in the criminal justice system and in American society in in his second term -- including on Tuesday before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- Obama has committed to doing more to address these issues in his final year-and-a-half. This week alone, he commuted the sentences of more than 40 low-level offenders, and is visiting a prison in Oklahoma today, becoming the first president to visit a federal penitentiary.

Obama, who has said he supports executions in some circumstances but raised concerns about the application of capital punishment, has not yet focused in this new push on racial disparities in capital trials -- the most serious cases before any criminal court. Now, just as he publicly changed his opinions on other major social issues in which public opinion changed, like gay marriage, some have wondered whether the president will change his perspective. As the charts below show, support for the death penalty, for decades strong in the United States, has been declining in recent years, just as support for gay marriage has increased.

Ogletree predicted that the president will eventually have no choice but to oppose the death penalty, confronted with the data on racial disparities in capital punishment, as well as on the costs of litigating capital cases and on the number of defendants who are eventually exonerated.

"Even if he doesn't change his mind in the next year and a half, I think the public's point of view is going to influence him," Ogletree said. "As a citizen, he can have an enormous amount of influence."

The White House declined to comment for this story, beyond noting times Obama has talked about the issue in the past. He has said that he supports capital punishment in cases where the crime is especially horrific, but worried that the penalty is being meted out unfairly.

"In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems -- racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty," he said last year, following a gruesomely botched execution in Oklahoma.

He asked former Attorney General Eric Holder to review the issue, but the Justice Department hasn't made a recommendation. Last month, the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty, even when administered with what some physicians say is an excruciating cocktail of lethal drugs, although two of the justices raised questions about it remains constitutional. Only nine countries in the world actively execute people, including Iran, Sudan and North Korea, according to an Amnesty International report.

Some advocates for ending capital punishment have encouraged the White House not to take an overly activist stance, preferring action in the states where the issue may be less partisan. Support for capital punishment has fallen most sharply among Democrats and independents, compared to Republicans where support remains high. 

Still, advocates for ending capital punishment say the time is ripe for action. Nationwide, black defendants are more likely than white defendants to receive the death penalty, even after being convicted of similar crimes.

Nowhere has this been more true than in Philadelphia. The city's courts have a history of sentencing black defendants to death at some of the country's highest rates.  In Philadelphia County, for example, there are more African Americans on death row than any other county. Among counties with significant numbers of capital cases, Philadelphia also had the most minority defendants awaiting execution as a share of the overall minority population.

Philadelphia has also been the site of several important studies on how courts and juries treat defendants differently, depending on the color of their skin. One examination of 350 capital cases in the city found that when the law gave jurors a choice, they were 29 times more likely to return a death sentence if the defendant was black.

The racial disparities in death penalty cases have been well documented for decades. The scholar credited with establishing this field of enquiry was David Baldus, a law professor at the University of Iowa who died in 2011.

After studying capital cases in Philadelphia in the decade from 1983 to 1993, Baldus concluded that juries were 29 times more likely to sentence black defendants to death if they identified conflicting circumstances in the case that both aggravated and mitigated the severity of a crime. In such cases, jurors discretion over whether to return a capital sentence.

The disparity is even more pronounced when the victim is white.

"It's a black-lives-matter problem," said Jeffery Fagan, a law professor at Columbia University. "They don't matter when it comes to capital punishment."

Between 1977 and 2000 across Pennsylvania, murder cases involving a black defendant and a white victim resulted in death penalties at nearly five times the rate as cases in which the defendant was white, the victim black, according to figures from the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

The numbers suggest that jurors are acting on "a visceral fear response, unrelated to the severity of the crime," said the center's executive director, Robert Dunham.

"The risk in a death penalty case is that a jury may be sentencing a defendant to death not based on what he or she did, but because of conscious or subconscious fears that result from the defendant's race," he added.

A subsequent study with Baldus's data from Philadelphia found that black defendants with stereotypically African features -- such as as a broad nose, thick lips and dark skin -- were about twice as likely to receive death sentences in cases with white defendants.

Dunham, who is from Philadelphia, argued the process of selecting a jury for a capital case results in juries that are more likely to hold racial prejudices. The grimly named protocol of "death qualification," in particular, allows prosecutors to object to jurors who oppose death penalty.

Death qualification tends to exclude black jurors from capital cases, since though about 55 percent of all Americans support the death penalty, and the same share of blacks oppose it, according to one recent Pew survey.

As for the prosecutors themselves, about 95 percent of elected prosecutors are white, according to a study published this month.

In recent years, prosecutors in Philadelphia have stopped seeking so many death penalties, although death row there remains overwhelmingly black and Latino. Of the 24 death sentences imposed in Philadelphia in the 21st century, just one was given to a white defendant.

In the meantime, recent research in Delaware, North Carolina, Florida and elsewhere confirms that racial disparities in capital sentencing persist around the country.

Opponents of the death penalty are optimistic, however. Although a majority of Americans still support capital punishment, polls have shown declining support in recent years. Some compare the cause of abolition to that of gay marriage.

"Twenty years from now, people that are for the death penalty are going to be in the same place as people that are against gay marriage," Matthew Dowd, a strategist for former President George W. Bush, recently told ABC's "This Week."

This post has been expanded with comments from Jeffery Fagan.

News item: “Man calls cops on Connecticut flea market over Nazi and Confederate items.”

A Connecticut man suffered physical revulsion when he spotted Nazi and Confederate merchandise last week at a flea market near his home.

The man, who declined to use his name in media reports, said he saw a vendor selling the items at Redwood Flea Market in Wallingford and contacted police, reported the Record Journal.

“I was shaking and almost vomiting,” the man said, adding that he was Jewish and the grandson of a concentration camp survivor. “I had to run. My grandmother had numbers (tattooed on her body by Nazis).”

The man said the shop owner told him he had been selling so many Confederate weapons and flags that he could barely keep them in stock since the shooting of nine black churchgoers by a white supremacist in South Carolina.

Police investigated the man’s complaint but said the merchant had not broken any laws, and Mayor William W. Dickinson Jr. said he looked into the matter after the man contacted his office.

This man did what he could and what he needed to do. The merchandise in question was a direct attack on him, personally, and on people like him and he needed to get out of there. So please don’t take the story that follows as, in any way, a criticism of this man’s actions, or as a recommendation that everyone should do what I did, or as suggesting that everyone is in a position to do so.

The context of my situation was very different when, during one of the many summer street fairs back in Everybody’s Home Town, I came across a tent right there on the trolley tracks in front of the theater, where the vendor was selling Confederate Flag merchandise and “White Power” T-shirts. This merchandise wasn’t a direct attack on me, personally, but rather a direct attempt to appeal to me, personally. I wasn’t the one being attacked — just someone being invited to participate in an attack on others. I had the privilege, and the empowerment that comes with privilege, to safely take a different approach. So I did.

I approached the vendor and, with a strained politeness, suggested that these materials were not appropriate for our community and requested that he set them aside. I did not raise my voice and I did my best to project an air of respectful cordiality.

The vendor’s tent was right here. He hasn’t been back.

He responded by raising his voice and informing me that he had f–king paid for this space and that he had the f–king freedom of speech to sell whatever he f–king wanted to sell in his own f–king tent because this is f–king America. (He probably actually said “fuck” a bunch more times than that, but that was the gist of it.)

“You’re right,” I said. But since this is America, I reminded him, I also had the freedom of speech to say whatever I wanted to say out on the public street.

And so I began helping this man sell his Confederate flag decals and White Power T-shirts by standing just outside of his tent and loudly recruiting customers for him like a beer vendor at the ballpark.

“Rrrrray-cist T-shirts! Get your racist T-shirts! … Show the world that you’re a proud racist by wearing one of our fine racist T-shirts, available for white people of all sizes. … You, sir! You look like a fine, decent, intelligent person and a patriotic American … So move along, then! There’s nothing for you here, we’re selling racist T-shirts. Racist T-shirts here! Rrrrray-cist T-shirts!”

It went on like that. And on and on.

Fifteen minutes may not sound like a long time, but I was starting to get hoarse, and after quoting as much of the Declaration of Independence and 1 John as I could from memory — urging would-be customers to wear one of our fine racist T-shirts to proudly demonstrate they don’t believe any of that nonsense – I was starting to worry about running out of material.

Fortunately, that’s when the police arrived. The vendor called them. I was still barking at the top of my voice as the vendor spoke to the police officer behind me, so I didn’t hear their conversation and wasn’t sure what to expect when the officer put his hand on my shoulder. He steered me away, saying, “I need you to come with me, sir,” and walked me over to the sidewalk under the theater marquee.

Once we were out of ear-shot, the officer told me that the vendor was very upset but that he could “get this guy to play along” if it seemed like he was giving me a stern talking-to. He said the vendor had agreed to put away those T-shirts and all the Confederate stuff just as long as I agreed to go away and leave him alone.

So I did, and the vendor did, and that was that.

I lived there in the borough for another 10 years and went to every street fair I could because the food is always amazing. But I never saw that vendor, or his T-shirts, again.

(The moral of this story, if it’s not already clear, is that if you’re ever anywhere near Media, Pennsylvania, on a Sunday afternoon in the summertime, then you really need to go to one of the town’s street fairs. Don’t miss the booth for Margaret Kuo’s. Or Nooddi or Fellini’s or … heck, it’s all delicious.)

Bad bosses can add to your stress, diminish your creativity, and even threaten your health.

One head chef had a bad habit of throwing knives around the kitchen, in the direction of people that made him angry. Another woman's boss told her coworker she couldn't take a personal day to bring her dog to the emergency vet "because dogs are replaceable." Yet another boss was caught shaving time off of his employee's time cards and banking it into his own for a bigger bonus.

These are just some of the stories from a reddit thread about horrible bosses in which employees share their stories of angry, disrespectful and generally incompetent bosses.

These poor employees aren't alone. A huge number of people have had a bad boss at one point in their lives. Various polls of workers have shown that between 13 and 36 percent of U.S. workers report having had a dysfunctional manager, and 98 percent have reported experiencing uncivil behavior at work.

Of course, there are as many ways for bosses to be horrible as there are horrible bosses. There are the minor slights – dismissive behavior, passive aggressive emails, or privileging another worker’s accomplishments over your own. Then there are the more serious kinds of abuse.

But even the little slights can add up. And these behaviors are not just unpleasant for employees. Research suggests they are actually bad for worker health.

Experiencing rudeness at work, and even replaying the event in your head later, elevates levels of hormones called glucocorticoids, Christine Porath, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, recently argued in an op-ed for the New York Times. That can lead to disparate health issues, including increased appetite and obesity.

That’s right: In addition to making you unhappy, your rude boss may be making you fat.

Stress contributes to a range of other diseases, including cardiovascular problems, ulcers, even the common cold. A study published in the journal PLoS One in 2012 found that women with high job strain were 38 percent more likely to experience a cardiovascular event over a decade than women with low job strain.

Often, bosses may be adopting these attitudes unintentionally or unconsciously. Power hierarchies affect us in mysterious ways. People are more likely to be curt, dismissive or angry with those who sit below them on the workplace hierarchy than those who rank above them, and they may not even realize they are doing it.

Uhmmmm, yeah.

In her op-ed, Porath reminded us that we’re far more sensitive to slights to our own ego: “We ride a wave of pride or get swallowed in a sea of embarrassment based on brief interactions that signal respect or disrespect. Individuals feel valued and powerful when respected. Civility lifts people. Incivility holds people down. It makes people feel small.”

While people are focused on how much others respect them, they don't often pay as much attention to the effect of their attitudes on others. In surveys of hundreds of people in organizations carried out by Porath, more than half said they behaved uncivilly because they were overloaded. More than 40 percent said they didn’t have the time to be nice.

Sometimes rudeness is more calculated, however. Porath's research suggests that many people believe that having a tough or curt attitude helps them to project authority.

A quarter of Porath’s respondents thought that people would regard them as less of a leader if they behaved more civilly. Almost 40 percent said they were afraid they would be taken advantage of if they were too nice, and nearly half said it was better to “flex one’s muscle to garner power,” Porath writes.

Unfortunately for these people and their underlings, flexing one's muscles at work doesn't do that much to demonstrate authority. Instead, it appears to undermine employee performance. It leads to lost work hours and productivity, as workers put less effort into their jobs, feel less committed to the company, and suffer from stress or health problems that prevent them from working effectively.

It also affects employee performance in less obvious ways. Another study by Porath and Amir Erez showed that people who experienced or witnessed rude behavior performed significantly worse on puzzles and were less creative during a brainstorming task.

Researchers at the University of Louisville created a taxonomy that charts boss behavior in terms of how dysfunctional it is for the workplace, and how traumatic it is for the worker. The researchers define dysfunctional managers as those who disrespect employees, set up obstacles for them and violate psychological contracts, as the Post's Jena McGregor has written.

Dysfunctional behaviors range from overworking employees and taking credit for their ideas on the mild end, to explosive outbursts and destructive criticism on the other.

Skunked: An Integrative Review Exploring the Consequences of the Dysfunctional Leader and Implications for Those Employees Who Work for Them Human Resource Development Review

So what can be done about dysfunctional bosses? Whether you are a boss or an employee, start by being nice at work. If you are in a position of authority or want to get there someday, this will help, rather than hurt, your leadership potential.

Despite the common idea that “nice guys finish last,” research has shown that civility is key to getting ahead at work. Porath’s own research showed that employees in a biotechnology firm were more likely to seek a civil colleague out for work advice and see that person as a leader. Real leadership is far more connected with building trust and relationships that with inspiring fear.

If you have a terrible boss, your options may limited. But research from Ohio State University published in Personnel Psychology suggests workers who stand up for themselves when they are treated badly at work ultimately feel better about their jobs. They found that employees who stayed quiet while a boss ridiculed, intimidated or belittled them ended up with lower job satisfaction and commitment and more distress. Those who retaliated in some way, even through a passive aggressive action or ignoring their bosses’ criticism, felt more satisfied.

While acting out can make you feel better, it probably won’t help your difficult situation at work.

Lynn Taylor, a workplace expert and consultant, offers more constructive solutions. She proposes using the same kind of techniques that parents use on unruly toddlers to manage dysfunctional bosses.

She suggests a practice she calls "managing up": taking a step back, trying to understand the motivation behind your boss' behavior, and then taking a collaborative approach to fixing it. Even if you aren't being managed down, maybe you can make some progress by managing your boss.

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Neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats should envisage a future as a sort of soggy Syriza in sandals. I don’t like some of the welfare reforms in the Budget, but to make it the political dividing line is to fail to recognise the views of most people.

In a recent pamphlet David Howarth, a former MP, and Mark Pack, a prominent online activist, argued that their party should have a strategy of building a values-based centre-left core vote from the current single figure up to about 20%. They identify their target voters as: disproportionately female, young, educated to above degree level, inhabitants of London, on moderately higher than average incomes, serious newspaper readers, not religious and not white. 

Some of the HowarthPack argument stretches belief. Their core vote approach is essentially an appeal to a minority. Under the first-past-the-post system, it may win the party one or two student-heavy seats, but it may not do much for the Lib Dems in the seats they are left with, never mind in places like the south-west where they were so strong until recently. But they are surely correct that the right place for a liberal party to pitch its tent is among liberal-minded voters,

[Epistemic status: Very speculative,

Here’s a vignette from cognitive-behavioral therapy book When Panic Attacks, heavily edited for length:

A chronically anxious medical school professor named Nate suffered from low-self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy. One day, Nate brought me a copy of his CV. I was blown away. He’d listed over sixty pages of research publications, prestigious awards, and keynote addresses he’d given at major conferences around the world. I asked Nate how he reconciled his low self-esteem with all of his accomplishments. He said that every time he looked at his CV, he felt discouraged and told himself that his colleagues’ research studies were far more rigorous and important than his own. He said his paper seemed “soft” and consisted primarily of theoretical work, rather than hard-core laboratory research with real tissue. He said “Dr. Burns, no matter how much I accomplish, it never seems good enough.”

Perfectionism was clearly one of Nate’s self-defeating beliefs. I suggested that Nate use the Pleasure/Perfection Balance Worksheet to test this belief. I told him to write “If I can’t do something perfectly, it’s not worth doing at all” on the top of the sheet, and asked him to list several activities in the left-hand column. I told him to predict how satisfying and rewarding each activity would be, to record how satisfying and rewarding it was afterwards, and to rate how perfectly he did each activity. That way he could find out of it was true that he only enjoyed the things he did perfectly.

The next week, Nate had some interesting results to share with me. One of his activities was giving the welcoming lecture ot the incoming class of medical students. Nate gave this lecture every year because he was considered to be the most charismatic speaker at the medical school. Nate predicted this lecture would be 70% satisfying, but his actual satisfaction as only 20%. This was surprising, since he’d received a thirty-second standing obation, and he’d rated his perfection level for the talk at 90%.

I asked Nate why his satisfaction rating was so low. He explained that he always got standing ovations, so he routinely timed them. The previous year, the medical students had stood and cheered for more than a minute at the end of his talk. This year, the only stood and cheered for half a minute. Nate felt disappointed and started worrying that he was over the hill.

The second entry on Nate’s Pleasure/Perfection Balance Worksheet was that [he fixed a broken pipe in his bathroom]. He had to make several trips to the hardware story to buy tools and parts and to get tips on how to do it, so he didn’t get the pipe fixed until 10 PM. How explained that any plumber could have fixed the pipe in five minutes, so he rated his perfection as 5%. But his satisfaction level for this activity was 100%. In fact, he felt exhilarated. Nate said it was the most satisfying thing he’d done in years.

The result of Nate’s experiment was not consistent with his belief that things weren’t worth doing unless he did them perfectly. It dawned on him that there were many sources of satisfaction in his life that he’d overlooked, such as taking a walk through the woods with his wife, even though neither of them were world-class hikers, playing squash with his son, even though neither of them were champions, or just going out with his family for ice cream cones on a warm summer evening.

This experiment had a significant impact on Nate’s feelings of self-esteem and on his career. He told me that his feelings of anxiety and inferiority decreased, and his productivity actually increased because he was no longer so worried about having to do everything so perfectly.

At first I assumed this story was made up, but the book claims these are based on real patients, and even mentions how the writer showed videos of some of these therapy sessions to his classes. Interesting. How about another?

Several years ago, I did a three-day intensive workshop for a small group of psychotherapists in Florida. A marriage and family therapist named Walter explained that he’d been struggling with anxiety and depression for several months because Paul, the man he’d lived with for eight years, had found a new lover and left him. He put his hand on his chest and said: “It feels real heavy, right here. There’s just a sense of loneliness and emptiness about the whole experience. It feels so universal and final. I feel like this pain is going to go on forever, until the end of time.”

I asked Walter how he was thinking and feeling about the breakup with Paul. What was he telling himself? He saidL “I feel incredibly guilty and ashamed, and it seems like it must have been my fault. Maybe I wasn’t skillful enough, attractive enough, or dynamic enough. Maybe I wasn’t there for him emotionally. I feel like I must have screwed up. Sometimes I feel like a total fraud. Here I am, a marriage and family therapist, and my own relationship didn’t even work out. I feel like a loser. A really, really big loser.”

Walter recorded these five negative thoughts on his daily mood log:

1. I’ll never be in a loving relationship again
2. I must be impossible to live with and impossible to be in a relationship with
3. There must be something wrong with me
4. I totally screwed up and flushed my life down the toilet
5. I’ll end up as an old, fat, gray-haired, lonely gay man

He believed all of these thoughts very strongly.

You can see that most of Walter’s suffering results from the illogical way he’s thinking about the rejection. You could even say that Walter is treating himself far more harshly than Paul did. I thought the Double Standard Technique might help because Walter seemed to be a warm and compassionate individual. I asked wehat he’d say to a dear friend who’d been rejected by someone he’d been living with for eight years. I said “Would you tell him that there’s something wrong with him, that he screwed up his life and flushed it down the toilet for good?”

Walter looked shocked and said he’d never say something like that to a friend. I suggested we try a role-playing exercise so that he could tell me what he would say to a friend who was in the same predicament […]

Therapist (role-playing patient’s friend): Walter, there’s another angle I haven’t told you about. What you don’t understand is that I’m impossible to live with and be in a relationship with. That’s the real reason I feel so bad, and that’s why I’ll be alone for the rest of my life.

Patient (role-playing as if therapist is his friend who just had a bad breakup): Gosh, I’m surprised to hear you say that, because I’ve known you for a long time and never felt that way about you. In fact, you’ve always been warm and open, and a loyal friend. How in the world did you come to the conclusion that you were impossible to be in a relationship with?

Therapist (continuing role-play): Well, my relationship with [my boyfriend] fell apart. Doesn’t that prove I’m impossible to be in a relationship with?

Patient (continuing role-play): In all honesty, what your’e saying doesn’t make a lot of sense. In the first place, your boyfriend was also involved in the relationship. It takes two to tango. And in the second place, you were involved in a reasonably successful relationship with him for eight years. So how can you claim that you’re impossible to live with?

Therapist (continuing role-play:) Let me make sure I’ve got this right. You’re saying that I was in a reasonably successful relationship for eight years, so it doesn’t make much sense to say that I’m impossible to live with or impossible to be in a relationship with?

Patient (continuing-role-play:) You’ve got it. Crystal clear.

At that point, Walter’s face lit up, as if a lightbulb had suddenly turned on in his brain, and we both started laughing. His negative thoughts suddenly seemed absurd to him, and there was an immediate shift in his mood…after Walter put the lie to his negative thoughts, I asked him to rate how he was feeling again. His feeling of sadness fell all the way fromj 80% to 20%. His felings of guilt, shame, and anxiety fell all the way to 10%, and his feelings of hopelessness dropped to 5%. The feelings of loneliness, embarassment, frustration, and anger disappeared completely.

The book is quite long, and it’s full of stories like this. The author, who’s one of the top cognitive-behavioral psychiatrists in the world, describes his experience with the therapy as:

[When I first learned about this therapy, I thought] depression and anxiety seemed far too serious and severe for such a simplistic approach. But when I tried these methods with some of my more difficult patients, my perceptions changed. Patients who’d felt hopeless, worthless, and desperate began to recover. At first, it was hard to believe that the techniques were working, but I could not deny the fact that when my patients learned to put the lie to their negative thoughts, they began to improve. Sometimes they recovered right before my eyes during sessions. Patients who’d felt demoralized and hopeless for years suddenly turned the corner on their problems. I can still recall an elderly French woman who’d been bitterly depressed for more than fifty years, with three nearly-successful suicide attempts, who started shouting “Joie de vivre! Joie de vivre!” (“joy of living”) one day in my office. These experiences made such a strong impact on me that I decided my calling was in clinical work rather than brain research. After considerable soul-searching, I decided to give up my research career and become a full-time clinician. Over the years, I’ve had more than 35,000 psychotherapy sessions with depressed and anxious patients, and I’m every bit as enthusiastic about CBT as when I first began learning about it.

Okay. I am not one of the top cognitive-behavioral therapists in the world. I’ve been studying formal cognitive-behavioral therapy for about a week now, and been doing untrained ad hoc therapy on inpatients for a couple years. But I’ve also gotten to observe a lot of other people doing therapy, and talked to people who have had therapy, and treated patients who were simultaneously undergoing therapy, and the impression I got was very different.

Dr. Burns asks patients to question whether their anxiety and their negative thoughts are rational, and their faces light up and all of their psychiatric problems suddenly melt away.

The therapists I’ve seen ask patients to question whether their anxiety and their negative thoughts are rational, ever so tactfully, and the patients say “No shit, Sherlock, of course they aren’t, but just knowing that doesn’t help or make them go away, and I’ve been through this same spiel with like thirty people already. Now shut up and give me my Xanax.”

In my last post, someone asked what to do if they found cognitive-behavioral therapy hokey and patronizing. I said, only half joking, that “if you don’t like hokey patronizing things, CBT may not be for you.” I know it’s mean, and pessimistic, but everyone I’ve talked to has had pretty much the same experience. I used to attribute this to my friends being pretty smart, and maybe CBT was aimed as less intelligent people, but Nate The Genius Medical School Professor seems pretty smart. So does Walter The Therapist. Burns’ book includes a bunch of other vignettes about high-powered lawyers, graduate students, et cetera. They all find his suggestions of “Well, have you considered that your irrational negative thoughts might not be rational?” super life-changing.

You might have read the study this graph comes from: The Effects of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy As An Anti-Depressive Treatment Is Falling: A Meta-Analysis. As you can see, the Hedges’ g declined from about 2.5 in 1980 to around 1 today. The latest embarrassing set of results now show CBT doing no better than its old nemesis psychoanalysis. Why?

There are a lot of possible explanations. The smart money is always on “it never worked very well, but we’re finally doing studies that aren’t hopelessly biased”, but the analysis doesn’t find a clear difference in study quality. Other suggestions are that therapists have gotten less committed over time, or that the patient populations has changed. All of these sound reasonable. But let me mention one more possibility.

Every so often, psychiatrists joke about how so many people are depressed we might as well put Prozac in the water supply. Sometimes we say the same thing about lithium, although in that case we’re not joking.

Nobody’s ever talked about putting cognitive-behavioral therapy in the water supply, but insofar as that’s meaningful at all I would say we’ve kind of done it. Cognitive-behavioral ideas, like perfectionism, excessive self-blame, conditional versus unconditional self-respect, deep breathing, goal-setting, et cetera have become basic parts of popular culture. The whole self-esteem movement isn’t exactly cognitive-behavioral, but it’s certainly allied, and it certainly represents a shift to a style of thinking about the self and about psychology in a way that’s much more fertile for cognitive-behavioral ideas. Inside Out was kind of “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: The Movie”.

Although the particular book I’m reading is from 2006, Burns himself was one of Aaron Beck’s original students and one of the first cognitive-behavioral therapists ever. I wonder how many of these patients who seem absolutely shocked to realize that maybe their anxiety isn’t rational come from that very early period.

It’s very hard to track changes in people’s basic beliefs about psychology. I was flabbergasted to learn that until Dr. Benjamin Spock’s landmark 1940s book on child care, parents were told not to hug, kiss, or show affection to babies, because that would coddle them and make them weak, pampered adults. Before that, parents interacted with their kids much less, and it was assumed that siblings and nannies and friends would raise them, or they would raise themselves. It’s easy to read books about ancient Greece and not notice that they have a completely different view of the role of the self/individual than we do. So it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of the psychology we consider “obvious” is CBT that has seeped out into the water supply over the past thirty years.

If that were true, it would explain why CBT is no longer as effective – it’s just telling people things they already know.

It could be fairly asked: then why isn’t everybody already better? Depression seems to be increasing, though there’s a lot of argument about exactly how much; that doesn’t sound like what would happen if everyone were automatically getting a background level of therapy.

Here’s a theory, though it’s on even shakier ground than the other one. The meta-analysis proposes that CBT may have lost some placebo effect over time because patients no longer think of it as The Exciting New Thing. I’m not sure I can go along with that – my own analysis of psychotropic medications suggests patients very much prefer the old ones for some reason. But a big part of psychotherapy is placebo effect, so they might be on to something.

What part of psychotherapy provides the placebo? Is it going to the clinic? Talking to the therapist? Hearing fancy words like “self-estimation”? Doing worksheets?

One thing a lot of therapies have in common is that they provide the feeling of insights. For example, psychoanalysts are very good at coming up with surprising-but-plausible ways that your current problems are linked to things that happened to you as a child; the usual result is a patient feeling enlightened, like “You’re right, the leg pain that’s been bothering me is in the same part of my leg that accidentally brushed up against my mother’s breast one time when I was seven, that’s pretty interesting.”

Suppose that in the old days, CBT was an insight a minute and you were constantly hearing surprising things you’d never thought about before. And nowadays, you’re kind of absorbing a lot of those things by osmosis without it seeming too insightful, and then the therapy itself is anticlimactic. Could that lessen the placebo effect enough to account for the data?

I don’t know. Maybe after I’ve been training in formal CBT for more than a week, I’ll have more data and can report back to you.

[EDIT: Sarah writes: “In a way, seeing CBT stuff in pop culture inoculates people, I think. People will get as far as noticing “this negative thought is an anxiety symptom”, but not as far as *actually reversing it*. When people hadn’t heard of CBT, they first got the “this negative thought is irrational” message in a context when they were actively working on their problems, so they followed through with the ‘hard’ step of actually reversing the thought. Now, people run into the revelation that the ‘inner critic’ is wrong just by browsing facebook, when they’re *not* actively trying to fight their anxiety problems, so the revelation loses its force.”]

[EDIT 2: Paul Crowley points out a very similar theory in The Guardian]

I ran this on December 12, 2009 and it sparked a few tiny controversies with friends who claim they were there when it occurred and that it didn't happen at the Denny's or that a few other aspects of it were different. No one quibbled with the essence of the story though and as I predicted, a number of folks were pleased to see the photo of Dave Gibson. Here's what I had to say about him and my version (i.e., the accurate one) of the incident with Dave Berg…

Most of you probably didn't know him but I have a few friends who'll smile to see this photo of Dave Gibson, who was a prominent comic book fan/dealer/entrepreneur in Los Angeles back in the seventies and eighties. Dave passed away within the last ten years, — I'm sorry I can't be more precise — and he was a sweet, well-meaning guy who really, really loved comic books. When California introduced personalized license plates for cars, many people ran in and tried to nab the plate that would say COMICS. Dave got it…and he was very proud he got it, proud to drive around town with that on his auto. Years later when he moved out of the state, he continued to renew that plate for a while, just to hold onto it. (I'm not sure who has it now…)

Dave ran a comic book shop in L.A. for a time and he also tried publishing. In 1971, he invested darn near all the money he had in the world in a couple of ventures. One was a deal he made with Bill Gaines to manufacture facsimiles of the old fan club kit that EC Comics had issued in the fifties. Dave turned out a quality product and quickly sold every one he made…but claimed he'd tried so hard to do the thing right and to keep the costs down that he wound up losing bucks on the project.

Another, which turned out even less well for him, was an arrangement he made to reprint the run of Will Eisner's classic comic section, The Spirit, in little black-and-white replicas. Eisner wasn't happy with Dave's production values or with his marketing of the product. I think the problem was that Dave really just wanted to produce the items and be the guy to get The Spirit back into print, where it had not been in a very long time. He didn't care all that much about making a profit…which meant that Mr. Eisner, who was on a royalty deal, didn't make a profit. When Eisner angrily terminated their business arrangement after a year or so, Dave was crushed and I don't think he ever tried publishing anything again.

He had two other claims to fame. Jack Kirby knew him from the local convention circuit and liked him. When Jack took over Jimmy Olsen, he introduced a race of strange people called The Hairies and told Dave he was the inspiration for them. If you'd seen Dave at the time — I took the above photo a few years later when he'd tidied up a bit — you'd instantly perceive the connection, though I suspect Jack dreamed up The Hairies without thinking of Dave and then told him that just to please him. It did. Dave was very proud to have inspired something in any kind of comic book, especially one by Jack Kirby.

But among local fans, Dave will always be remembered for The Dave Berg Incident. This came about shortly after National Lampoon had done its famous parody of MAD magazine in its October, 1971 issue. Someone has posted it to the web at this website and it was seeing it again there that prompted me to tell this story here.

In the grand spirit of giving someone a taste of their own you-know-what, the NatLamp folks skewered MAD but good…and even the MAD staffers admired the effort. Some admitted the satire was dead-on and deserved. One of the most talked-about pages was the spoof/attack (take your pick) on Dave Berg, who did "The Lighter Side of…" section for MAD. It was drawn by Stu Schwartzberg, a very funny gent who did some work for Marvel in the early seventies, occasionally contributing to their comics but mainly operating the world's smelliest photostat machine in the office.

Dave Berg always drew himself into one or more of his cartoons. In the parody, a kid walks up to him and asks, "Say, you aren't the same Dave Berg who draws for MAD magazine, are you?" Dave Berg says, "That's me, young man."

The kid then asks, "No kidding, you're the guy who does that Lighter Side thing?" Dave Berg says, "That's right, youngster."

The kid says, "Hey, you're really putting me on! You really write all that stuff about baby-sitters and blind dates and drive-in movies?" Dave Berg proudly says, "Yes, I do, son."

The kid then says, "Boy, are you an asshole!" Dave Berg reacts accordingly.

Not nice but funny…especially if you recall how Berg manufactured his own, slightly-less-insulting punch lines. So a year or so after it comes out, we're all at one of the San Diego Comic-Cons. My memory is that this occurred at the '72 con, which was the first one at the El Cortez Hotel. I further recall that this took place in the waiting area of the Denny's restaurant just down the hill from that hotel. Gibson walks in with some friends and sees Dave Berg standing there. This gives Gibson an idea that he somehow thinks Mr. Berg will appreciate. He goes up to him and says, "Say, you aren't the same Dave Berg who draws for MAD magazine, are you?" Dave Berg says, "That's me, young man."

Gibson then asks, "No kidding, you're the guy who does that Lighter Side thing?" Dave Berg says, "That's right, youngster."

Gibson says, "Hey, you're really putting me on! You really write all that stuff about baby-sitters and blind dates and drive-in movies?" Dave Berg proudly says, "Yes, I do, son."

Gibson, pleased that Mr. Berg is playing along and following the script, then delivers the kicker. He says, clearly and loudly so all us onlookers can hear, "Boy, are you an asshole!"

There is silence. In fact, of all the silences I have heard in my life, this one most closely approximated the sound of floating adrift in deep outer space. It was finally broken only by the noise of Dave Berg sputtering and fuming and storming off.

Turns out Dave Berg had never seen the National Lampoon parody.

The post Foto File appeared first on News From ME.

From The Onion:

Shocking the literary world once again, acclaimed author Harper Lee announced through her publisher Tuesday the surprise release of her third novel, My Excellent Caretaker Deserves My Entire Fortune. “On behalf of Ms. Lee, we’re delighted to bring the public this moving new story, which follows the heartwarming relationship between a deaf and nearly blind author in the small-town South and the extremely kind and attentive caretaker to whom she wills every penny of her $45 million estate,” said HarperCollins president Michael Morrison, adding that the 185-page tale vividly brings to life the setting of a present-day assisted living facility in Monroeville, AL, where an 89-year-old protagonist named Harper comes to the life-changing decision to hand over all the money in her bank account, her property, and all future proceeds from the books she has published to her extremely upstanding and unselfish friend and lawyer, Tonja.

Link to the rest at The Onion and thanks to Dana and several others for the tip.

For those unfamiliar with The Onion, it is definitely satire.

It’s rare that events line up to give you neat examples and ways to make a point, but that’s what’s happened today. In Cardiff, Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams was making a speech setting out her vision for the future of the party in Wales and beyond, while somewhere in the aether between the Highlands and London, a piece by Danny Alexander on a similar subject was heading to the New Statesman. Even if they weren’t planned to appear on the same day, they provide a quite stark example of how much some people have learned from reflecting on the past five years in the two months since the election, and how little others have.

Kirsty Williams understands just what happened:

During the General Election, it became clear to me that people might have known what we stopped, but not what we achieved.
Yes, over those five years we did restrain some of their worst narrow-interest, anti Europe, anti green, nasty party instincts.
But I didn’t come into politics to mitigate the Tories. When I was growing up in Llanelli my political awakening didn’t coincide with thinking “if only someone could give Margaret Thatcher a bit more heart”.
I didn’t campaign for devolution and home rule because those Tory Governor Generals they kept sending over the bridge were just a little misplaced.
And I’m proud to be a foot soldier in the long battle between radicals and Tories that’s been fought in Powys in particular for generations.
Those differences and debates still matter. And we need to make that clear, and to win our case.
But we will have to persuade before we can prevail. And that needs a clear, distinctive and coherent message.

Meanwhile, Danny Alexander is busily praising George Osborne’s budget, and warning the party against becoming ‘a soggy Syriza in sandals’ and agreeing with Harriet Harman on not opposing cuts in tax credits:

I don’t like some of the welfare reforms in the Budget, but to make it the political dividing line is to fail to recognise the views of most people.

The most worrying thing about reading Alexander’s article is remembering that it was the instincts he displays here which were supposedly holding back the Tories during the last Government. He sounds like a man who’s swallowed the Tory mantra whole, even claiming that this budget is closer to his own ‘Yellow Budget’ and doesn’t see any lurch to the right in it. His conclusion is effectively that the party should be not much more than a vaguely liberal voice on the centre-right, embracing Tory economics while trying to make a case for civil liberties, the environment and the EU. It’s the sort of contribution that makes you realise why no one is lamenting his absence from the leadership election.

Kirsty Williams, on the other hand, is offering a much more invigorating vision of a party that’s free to go out and be unashamedly liberal again. She understands that while we can’t pretend the coalition didn’t happen, that doesn’t mean we have to pretend it was the greatest thing ever and no mistakes were made. She understands that if the party is to survive, in Wales or anywhere, we need a clear vision that marks us out as different. The only sogginess on display here is coming from Danny Alexander, happy to subsume the party in an undistinguished centrist mush. Williams is the only one making a case for the future of the party and liberalism as a force in British politics.

From Slate:

Nancy Drew—the eternally teenaged detective who has appeared in hundreds of books since The Secret of the Old Clock was published in 1930—recently turned 85. Over the years, dozens of authors have penned the sleuth’s adventures under the pseudonym of Carolyn Keene, and she has been the subject of TV series, movies,graphic novels—even a line of video games. Her influence is so wide that not onebut three Supreme Court justices have cited her as a childhood hero. It’s no wonder then that the 85^th anniversary milestone stirred up nostalgic media coverage and has been celebrated with conventions as far-flung as Iowa, Ohio, and New Jersey.

But last week marked another, quieter anniversary for Nancy Drew: what would have been the 110^th birthday of Mildred “Millie” Wirt Benson, the first author ever to write under the name “Carolyn Keene.” Despite having produced numerous children’s books under a variety of names, Benson herself is not widely known—which is unfortunate, because as a gutsy journalist, aviator, and feminist (though she didn’t like to call herself one), she was one of the most interesting YA writers of all time.

Benson ghost-wrote 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew books for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the publisher also behind The Hardy Boys and The Bobbsey Twins. She became involved with the series after answering a trade ad placed by the Syndicate’s founder, Edward Stratemeyer. In Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, Melanie Rehak examines the contributions Benson made to the now-iconic character. “She gave Nancy many of the qualities we remember so fondly and fiercely, like her determination, her intelligence, her self-reliance and her athleticism,” Rehak told Slate in an email. “Stratemeyer hired Mildred because he wanted someone who could infuse Nancy with these things, and he could tell Mildred was a go-getter from the moment she answered his ad.”

. . . .

Just 25 years old when the first was published, Benson, then Mildred A. Wirt, was also a tenacious reporter, for the now-defunct Toledo Times, and later for the Toledo Blade. She worked there, despite her failing eyesight and a tendency to fall asleep at her desk, until her death in 2002, aged 96, and was at work on the day she died. She outlived both her journalist husbands, first AP reporter Asa Wirt, then her Toledo Times editor George Benson.

Even in the earliest days of her journalism career, Benson was tenacious. “In the ’40s, when she started working at the Toledo Times, she was a court reporter. She got the job because a lot of men went off to war, and they were starting to hire women,” said Fisher. When female staffers were told that when the men returned, the women would likely be out of a job, Benson only worked harder, and was competitive with her male colleagues. In her determination to get a story, she became notorious for parking herself outside councilmen’s office doors. One such councilman was so desperate to avoid talking to her, the story goes, that he climbed out his office window rather than face her questions.

. . . .

Some of Benson’s greatest adventures happened while she was in her 50s and 60s. She made numerous trips to Central America, including the Yucatán Peninsula in the 1960s, traversing the jungle in a Jeep, canoeing down rivers, visiting Mayan sites, and witnessing archaeological excavations. She had been an active swimmer since her college years, and who would often take a dive at the Toledo Club before going to work at the Blade. She saw Haley’s Comet twice in her lifetime: first as a child in 1910, and then again in 1986.

Benson remained largely unknown outside her circle until she testified during a 1980 trial for a case involving Nancy Drew publishers—the first public acknowledgement of her involvement with the series. Simon & Schuster and Grosset & Dunlap later officially recognized her authorship of Books 1 through 7, 11 through 25, and 30, in 1994. Benson subsequently became a legend for Nancy Drew fans.

Link to the rest at Slate and thanks to Matthew for the tip.

First, thanks to everyone who shared my previous post on splits that don’t exist within the Liberal Democrats (but still apparently live on in the conventional wisdom of political reporters).

However, just because the image of a party irredeemably riven by a split between classical liberals and social democrats is incorrect, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t factions within the party, it’s just that characterising them in terms of the merger – and assuming they’ve persisted unchanged since 1988 – is the wrong way of going about looking at them.

This post isn’t about me listing factions, but rather a defence of the existence of factions which are often maligned as nefarious influences within parties, but in my view are part and parcel of trying to be a party that attempts to have an appeal to anyone outside of a small coterie. The actual task of identifying and classifying the factions within the Liberal Democrats I leave to someone with a thicker skin than mine.

Perhaps because of the party’s origins in a merger, there is a tendency to decry factionalism in the Liberal Democrats. This can be an honourable and idealistic – ‘why can’t we all just get along?’ – position to take, but it can also become quite stifling, imposing a passive conformism on people who try to dissent. Factions are seen as representing divisions within the party, divided parties are bad, and therefore factions and factionalism are bad and must be stamped out.

I take a different view, and see the party as being under-factionalised (a position put forward by Richard Grayson a few years ago) and in need of actually expressing its internal differences more openly. Factions are often part of a political irregular verb – I encourage healthy debate, you spend too much time talking to people who agree with you, they’ve factionalised the party – and get depicted as negative forces, but they exist in just about every political party (and the ones they don’t exist in are too small for us to be concerned with). The Tories range from the Tory Reform Group and Bright Blue through to Cornerstone and Better Off Out, while Labour have Tribune, the Campaign Group, Progress, Compass and plenty of other groups within them. If a party is going to be successful in attracting members and voters, it has to cover a wide ideological space and can’t expect all of its members to hold the exact same position on every issue. Parties expect members to support the general principles and aims of the party, but politics and ideology are not exact sciences, and people will naturally interpret those in different ways.

It’s entirely natural for people who feel a certain way about issues to come together and work to spread their ideas. After all, that’s one reason they joined a political party in the first place. Factions are just the way this process gets carried out, allowing people to organise and promote themselves, instead of letting things happen in hidden undercurrents and coded language. Political parties have their own internal politics, and calling for an end to factions is the making the same argument as ‘let’s take the politics out of this': what they’re really asking for is for everyone to stop arguing and agree with them.

Like most things, if you let factionalism go too far it can become unhealthy, and there are examples where the parties themselves have become effectively empty shells that factions fight to control, or where the factions separate into new parties. Those are rare occurences, and shouldn’t prevent the development of healthy and organised internal debate within a party. As Liberal Democrats we generally Mill’s notion that ideas need to be tested, challenged and discussed to improve and strengthen them. Factions allow for different strands and interpretations of liberalism to discuss and put forward their ideas in an organised and open way, rather than having to almost surreptitiously do so. Proper and lasting consensus can’t be imposed by a diktat from above seeking to depoliticise debate, but from an open process where people express and accept difference.

That’s why even if the media perception of what our factions are is wrong, we shouldn’t be afraid to admit that they do exist. Pretending they’re not there leads to a lot more trouble than accepting them does, as acceptance allows us to establish proper norms of how to interact and debate with each other, rather than concealed sniping from under cover.

It has been “An Embarrassing Week for Christians Sharing Fake News,” Ed Stetzer writes for Christianity Today.* By “Christians,” Stetzer means the CT audience, which is to say white evangelicals. White evangelicals, he says, seem particularly susceptible to believing and spreading fake news stories because they are “gullible”:

So, here is the deal.

We are too gullible. …

You just make us all look gullible when you don’t do simple steps like that. …

Posting links to fake [news stories] just makes all of us look (rightly) gullible. …

Be less gullible next time.

That’s the gist of Stetzer’s entire post, which makes a commendable case against credulous gullibility and offers some practical advice for how to be more skeptical when evaluating outrageous-seeming news stories online.

All well and good. But all, also, utterly beside the point. Gullibility is not the problem.

It would be nice if it was. Gullibility, after all, is a kind of innocence — an honest mistake. And it’s easy for anyone to make such an honest mistake, gullibly getting tricked by a fake news story, a subtle parody or a well-crafted poe and then passing it along to others while genuinely believing it to be true.

That happens, too, to just about everyone at some point. And when that happens, the advice Stetzer provides applies:

You fell for a hoax. Say it and move on.

You were deceived. It’s OK to admit that. You don’t have to try to cover your tracks and make some sort of lame excuse to make yourself look better.

Have some humility, be willing to admit someone fooled you, and move on.

But even such simple cases of apparent gullibility are rarely wholly innocent. They tend to be “Some Guy” stories — Some Guy from the Other Tribe did a foolish/hateful thing. It takes a bit of effort to double-check such stories to confirm that they are true, and we may not be inclined to make that effort because we’re already predisposed to believe such things about people from the Other Tribe. We can call that being “gullible,” but note that this gullibility includes at least an element of both laziness and prejudice — and neither laziness nor prejudice can be defended as wholly innocent or an honest mistake.

But the stories Stetzer describes in his post are not even this kind of semi-innocent mistakes. These are Scary Stories, and simple ignorance or laziness are never an excuse for passing along Scary Stories. It I tell you that Some Guy said something foolish, and then it turns out that he never actually said such a thing, I can plausibly claim that I “fell for a hoax” or that I was “deceived.” But if I tell you that a zombie horde is shambling toward our town when, in fact, no such army of the undead exists, then I cannot defend my passing along this false claim by saying I was innocently deceived and mistaken.

Why not? Because the urgency of the alleged threat is such that it would not be possible for me to genuinely believe it to be true without also stopping at nothing to prove it such to myself and to others. It’s conceivable that I was just too lazy to confirm what Some Guy said before passing along that fake story, but if I really believe that the Scary Story is true, then I should really be scared, and that fear should have roused me from the apathy, laziness and ignorance that might keep me from bothering to confirm some less-consequential bit of dubious gossip about Some Guy.

Anyone who genuinely believes a Scary Story to be true will be compelled to confirm it and to reconfirm it with a desperate urgency borne of that genuine belief.

This is why Ed Stetzer’s post about the “embarrassing” gullibility of credulous, naive Christians getting duped by “fake news” ultimately feeds into and reinforces the very problems he’s reacting against. By misidentifying the problem as one of innocence and honest mistakes, he fuels the self-righteous fantasizing that drives this phenomenon.

The fake stories Stetzer describes are not being spread in good faith by innocent dupes. They are not innocent and they are not dupes. And the stories are not merely “fake,” but false. The biblical term for what he’s describing is “bearing false witness against your neighbor.”

An innocent dupe — or even a partly innocent dupe — spreading a fake story in good faith isn’t deliberately lying. They’re stating untruth, but only because they have been deceived, not because they are attempting to deceive others. But those who are bearing false witness against their neighbors have not been, themselves, deceived. They are, rather, choosing to pretend that they have been deceived in order that they can, in turn, invite others to choose to pretend the same thing.

Consider Stetzer’s first example — the clumsy bogus story about a pastor supposedly being arrested for refusing to conduct a same-sex wedding ceremony. Pretending to believe such a story can, for a while at least, feel good. It lets you indulge in that emotional kick that comes from imagining yourself to be one of the righteous who is being persecuted for righteousness’ sake. It’s not a lie so much as a form of play — not all that different from fantasy role-playing games or from children in the yard delighting themselves by tying a beach towel around their neck and pretending to be Superman.

The spreading of such stories isn’t so much an attempt to get others to fall for the hoax as it is an invitation to join the game. “Come play with us” — come participate in our fantasy game of make-pretend.

The real problems arise when enough people have been recruited into the game that their collective participation in the pretense makes it begin to seem real to them — when the children with their beach-towel capes start jumping off the roof because they’ve convinced themselves they can really fly.

C.S. Lewis discusses all of this in his book Mere Christianity — a favorite book revered by Stetzer’s white evangelical audience of Christianity Today subscribers. Here, again, is what Lewis has to say about the “Christian” habit of spreading fake news that Stetzer tries to address:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

Notice that Lewis never uses the word “gullible.” Unlike Stetzer, he recognizes that gullibility has nothing to do with it.

Lewis recognizes that the problem isn’t simply the “embarrassment” of credulous Christians naively accepting fake stories about their neighbors or their enemies. He’s seen that happen sometimes, and finds it disappointing, but it’s not the thing that really disturbs him or the thing that he condemns in his harshest language.

Far more upsetting than any supposed gullibility is the reaction of these Christians to being confronted with the evidence that their fake-news Scary Story is, indeed, fake. They’re disappointed. They’re defensive. They’re angry.

And that, as Lewis says, is all you need to know. That is all the proof you could ever require that we are not dealing here with gullibility or innocence or even ignorance. We are dealing with self-righteous fantasizing, and with malice.

Someone who is gullibly frightened by a fake Scary Story will be relieved and pleased and grateful to learn that the purported threat is not real, that the monster is not under the bed, the barbarians are not at the gate and the sky is not falling. When we do not see such relief, joy and gratitude on learning the truth, then we can see — we can know — that we are dealing with something other than gullibility.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* A publication that believes gay and lesbian couples are “destructive to society.”

George Eaton’s analysis is right

Tories have now pulled votes on fox hunting, EVEL and Human Rights Act – proof that a majority of 12 is barely a majority at all.

— George Eaton (@georgeeaton) July 14, 2015

The doctors are not keen. Sir James Barr, chairman of the BMA, believes it will "destroy individual effort and increase the spirit of dependence," and that "only loafers and wastrels will benefit". 

The British Medical Journal says that if you wanted to abolish the medical profession it would be "hardly possible to conceive a scheme better calculated to achieve that end that the present Bill". Letters to the Lancet call it "a bold and sinister attempt to degrade our calling" and "an attempt to capture and enslave our profession". 

Nor are the newspapers enthusiastic. The Daily Mail has declared its opposition to "the hateful task of collecting this unpopular tax thus thrust upon Mr Lloyd George's hapless victims". For, "it is not only 3d a week we shall lose, but our independence, self-respect and character" ... And a reader says: "If the Insurance Bill becomes law it will be advisable for us to leave England." 

Meanwhile the Evening News is warning that "we shall never boast of freedom again if we let this measure past," and writing feelingly of "these days of highly paid servants". 

The cost of employer insurance for domestic staff is uppermost in many minds. Five aristocrats have founded a League of Protest and called a public meeting. As we arrive, Lady Desart is reaching her peroration: 

"This England never did nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror." 

Later, when the government sends servants a circular about the new scheme, the headmaster of Eton will accuse it of "interfering with home life to an unprecedented degree". 

And if you listen carefully you can hear the Conservative leader pledging to repeal the act as soon as he comes into office.