(ADDED) VALUE(S)

Googling stuff to show off your knowledge at parties that you don't enjoy. Throwing one another under the bus to save your jobs. Firing people of integrity for abiding by the law, for getting in your way, for being expensive, for not looking or sounding quite right, for making you feel slightly uncomfortable, for slight advantage. Overworking, undercutting, overlooking, underinforming and then discarding each other. Getting jobs by sucking, kissing, preening, knobbing, twatting etc. etc. It's why I'm gone and I can't come back.

BATTERY

You are sold the idea of owning a home. It's an anxiety sell: if you don't own your home, you're a loser, you're falling behind, you're not on the ladder being climbed by your more successful peers. So you get a job and your mum and dad give you the money you need for a huge deposit. The house is insubstantial. It was built, cheaply, more than one hundred years ago to house manual labourers who had no material possessions beyond a tin bath and two sets of clothes, one for work and one for Sunday best. Or you buy an overstyled, brand new tickytacky box made of crap. You work your loans and credit cards to fill the small space with things and to knock the walls about, not really managing to create a convincing copy of a look laid out in a magazine. A look to which you have been taught to aspire this month.

Then comes the redundancy, the illness, the divorce, the drugs, the booze, the this and that. So you lose "your" house. The bank sells it to another person who has been led to believe that she needs to "own" a "home". Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. So those pennies saved by your mums and dads are steadily transferred to where they really belong - onto the balance sheets of banks bailed out with your money. No mortgage paid off ever again. The bank gets all your money and ruins your life. You are there to make them money. Housing developments are capital farms. You're a battery hen. Or, if you want to reference The Matrix and go all Scottish, "You're a battery, hen."

ON MERITOCRACY

The market is a kakistocracy and a kleptocracy. Many 'successful' people are those with the brass neck to cheat, steal and bamboozle those of us who are not unscrupulous enough or brave enough to do likewise. Many of the 'successful', moreover, were given a leg up - daddy's connections, inherited wealth and whatnot. This is a rentier economy of the mediocre, the mad and the bad. I'm reminded of Bolesław Prus's late 19th Century novel 'The Doll', set in Russian-dominated Poland, a society plagued by the inertia, greed and stupidity of its ruling class. I can't read it without thinking that a number of western countries, Britain included, are regressing quickly to the conditions described by Prus.

DOWN WITH THE KIDS

David Cameron: the man who grew up wanting to be Prime Minister just because he wanted to be Prime Minister; the man who fucked up the future of his country in order to win one more election. Today we learn that his first post-politics "job" is to be the chairmanship of the National Citizen Service, a summer camp wheeze available for those able to stump up fifty quid to keep their teenage kids out of their hair for a week. We are meant to believe that the point of this cheesily-advertised gimmick is to "instil responsibility in young people".

For now, let's not get into challenging the dubious notion that young people are inherently less responsible than, say, middle-aged people. Let's take it as axiomatic even though it should not be.

The UK would not need a quango designed to "instil", via some contrived process, the laudable quality of "responsibility" if British subjects could look forward to satisfying, stable employment paid well enough to sustain a decent life and adequate housing. Responsibility would be among the qualities to flower naturally in workplaces in which employees felt valued and were paid properly. Same goes for the effects of enjoying the support networks inherent in neighbourhoods of long-term residents secure in their ability to pay the rent or mortgage.

But this is a pipe dream. Late model capitalism - against which a serious challenge is seemingly unthinkable - deliberately creates anxious, self-loathing, self-medicating individuals prepared to fight each other for table scraps: gig economy non-jobs in the real world; likes and retweets in the virtual world into which young (and not-so-young) people must retreat, attempting to mitigate their alienation but, in practice, making it very much worse.

THE HUMOURLESS RIGHT

When I were a lad, politics was easy. The working folk, by and large, voted Labour. Votes for the Tories were cast by those with pockets full of cash and heads full of the desire to hang onto that cash. A Liberal voter tended to tick a few of the following boxes: geography teacher; wearer of sandals; supper of real ale; into caravanning; beards; very concerned about local issues such as dog shit on the pavements; Methodist, Quaker or Kumbayah Anglican. Parliamentarians from these three camps had quite a lot in common, ideologically at least, with the activists and rank-and-file members of their respective parties. 

Flash forward to 2016. Here in Britain, across Europe, and in the USA we are seeing the wholesale desertion of mainstream political parties and candidates. People like me sometimes get to nod approvingly when this benefits avowedly and meaningfully left-wing organisations such as Portugal's Bloco de Esquerda, Spain's Podemos or Syriza in Greece. Sadly, though, the rapidly waning trust for established politicians and parties more often seems to be working in favour of regressive opportunists seeking to leverage the fears of those afflicted by a declining standard of living and the worst effects of technological and economic change. Hence the rise of right-wing populist, nationalist and far-right neofascist parties across Europe. Hence the steadily accelerating erosion of the gains made in preceding decades by those fighting for workers' rights, women's rights, minority rights and against the impoverishing effects of unfettered rentier capitalism. Hence, under the disingenuous guise of a putative concern for "free speech", the rolling back of language scornfully dismissed as "politically correct" by those who wish to reclaim a lost freedom to use words like nigger, kike, spic, raghead and faggot.

The last remark above paraphrases part of an excellent, terrifying article by Chris Hedges about Donald Trump and the rise of a new American fascism. A more amusing take on the attacks being sustained by advocates of kinder, less alienating language can be enjoyed by watching Stewart Lee discussing so-called political correctness. Or you could read Paul Mason's recent piece about the worst of what we encounter online, which includes this observation:

"Wherever the internet is not censored it is awash with anger, stereotypes and prejudice. Beneath that is a thick seam of the kind of material all genocides feed off: conspiracy theories and illogic. And, beyond that, you find something the far right didn’t quite achieve in the 1930s: a culture that sees offensive speech as a source of amusement and the ability to publish racist insults as a human right."

I would personally be less concerned about this kind of discourse if the sadistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian, narcissistic people engaging in it were only marginalised, socially awkward types expressing their helpless rage from the box rooms of their parents' houses. Obvious billy-no-mates types such as Joshua Bonehill-Paine and David Child are capable of doing some harm, but only on a pretty limited basis. 

But it's more mainstream than that. Well-known people making a living (sometimes a very good one) from using spitefully provocative language for dark purposes include Katie Hopkins, Nigel Farage, Paul Staines, Toby Young, Milo Yiannopoulos and Rod Liddle.

One thing all of these characters have in common is the adoption of a pose whereby they claim that their own words embody common sense or straight talking or telling it like it is. They purport to be brave enough to be articulating what everyone else is thinking but is too scared to say out loud. Being so courageous and being possessed of strong convictions they will not flinch from the rough and tumble of very robust debate. They don't get offended because taking offence is a cowardly act associated with leftie bed wetters and hand-wringing social justice warriors. They scorn the brittle, humourless defensiveness of the left. They can take a joke, giving as good as they get. Or can they? In my experience this is really not the case. By way of evidence, I can cite the list of Twitter account holders by whom this is my england is blocked. Alongside the even more obviously obnoxious likes of Nick Griffin, George Galloway and Max Keiser, my roll of honour includes a couple of the supposed free speech enthusiasts named above. 

Getting blocked by Toby Young and Paul Staines can possibly be achieved through the use of foul, abusive language. But in my case, Messrs. Young and Staines decided to deny me the dubious honour of further interaction just because they prefer not to read dissenting reactions to their deliberately provocative statements online. It seems that these guys take offence pretty easily. It seems they can't take a joke. All at the same time as characterising those on the left as po-faced and prone to taking offence.  

Much the same, it seems, can be said of Breitbart's UK editor, the extraordinarily weird Raheem Kassam. Despite (or perhaps as a reaction to) being the grandson of Muslim immigrants from India, Kassam regularly uses Twitter to rail against Muslims and immigrants. 

The exchange which led to Kassam blocking this is my england on Twitter a little while ago does indeed seem to indicate that he can't take a joke and that he's extremely thin-skinned. The opening gambit of this exchange consisted of the Breitbart man tweeting a picture of a jeweller's shop on the Edgware Road, accompanied by the remark "This is London... apparently." He seemed to be taking issue with the presence of a business whose fascia included Arabic script. So, in wag and funster mode, I decided to respond with pictures of other businesses representing foreign influences on the look and feel of the great British high street. For this, I was blocked. These free-speech-loving, lefty-bedwetter-mocking types: so humourless, so tetchy.

This is London... apparently. pic.twitter.com/FWeYKIpLXP

— Raheem Kassam (@RaheemKassam) January 23, 2016

. @RaheemKassam this is London... apparently pic.twitter.com/l6QJwUHpbX

— I'M DONE (@thisismyengland) January 24, 2016

. @RaheemKassam This is London... apparently pic.twitter.com/8T8DEOxWKm

— I'M DONE (@thisismyengland) January 24, 2016

. @RaheemKassam This is London... apparently pic.twitter.com/BDYeun6J5B

— I'M DONE (@thisismyengland) January 24, 2016

CHOOSY CHILD

Relentlessly angry men who hate and fear women, blacks, Asians, Muslims, Jews, gays, difference, change, the future: following George's Bernard Shaw's sage advice about not wrestling with a pig, I only rarely bother to engage with these guys. As Shaw has it, you get dirty and, besides, the pig likes it.

I went on about all this at some length back in March, mentioning the destructive, malicious (but ultimately tragicomic) jailbird Joshua Bonehill-Paine along the way. Prior to his current incarceration, I did lower myself to the point of reacting to his horrible nonsense once or twice. Not an edifying experience. Left an unpleasant taste. So much so, in fact, that by and large I continue to stay out of the discussions about this notorious troublemaker which continue to simmer on months after Bonehill-Paine got locked up. A good number of people clearly find the guy fascinating, both from the perspective of support and approval and from positions of antipathy. Car crash stuff. Can't quite look away. The story of Bonehill-Paine might even provide good material for a fictional treatment in words or on film: a much sillier, lonelier version of the character played by Edward Furlong in American History X, perhaps.

Anyway, my occasional monitoring of the fizzling chitchat about this odd cat sometimes yields evidence of further angry, disappointed young(-ish) men at least as deluded, hubristic and bitter as Bonehill-Paine himself. One such is a poor chap named David Child who once allowed himself to be cheated out of £500 by Bonehill-Paine. Styling himself a nationalist and champion of "white rights", Child ticks all the boxes when it comes to whom he hates and fears. It wouldn't do you much good to look at a large quantity of his output. But I offer one gem for your consideration. 

In conversation with some like-minded souls, Child contends that he "won't" consider sexual relations with any woman who has previously joined in coitus with "a non-white". His prerogative, of course. But when one sees a photograph of Mr Child (pictured below, on the right, shaking hands with Bonehill-Paine), it becomes difficult to imagine that he often finds himself in the position of turning down offers of sex, even on the grounds stated in his above tweet. But maybe I'm being unkind. There's someone for everyone, I guess. Maybe even this guy.

LIVING ABROAD

Life lived abroad can be lived more vividly, more intensely and more memorably than life lived at home. I think this is especially true of time spent in a country where the language is wholly unfamiliar at first. Handling the new lingo while carrying out every simple task can be daunting if you want it to be. Or you can go the other way and treat it as an endless set of pleasurable challenges, stretching the brain and enabling new ways of thinking about meaning and communication. The latter has been my experience.

I spent just four years living, working and learning in Poland. Almost twenty years have passed since I returned to the UK with mixed feelings and great memories.  A relatively short chunk of my life spent there, then, and a stint which ran its course quite a while ago. But the memories remain vivid, usually recalled with fondness and often with a distinct pang of longing.

I am sometimes surprised by the continued sharpness and brightness of those recollections of that time spent as a foreigner living away from home. After all, I have relatively few photos taken in that period and no electronic archive of anecdotes written at the time. This is all rather hard to imagine, perhaps, for youngsters growing up in this age of online, mobile, social and always-on. But around the time I returned to England, while I did know of the existence of Internet browsing and email, I had used neither myself. I had seen people using mobile phones but had never owned one myself. I had heard of digital cameras but was still committing my memories to 35mm film. So it's all pretty much in the old noggin: a store of remembered pleasures. 

It is not my intention today to write a long piece about those pleasures or about the many ways in which adapting to a foreign country informed my view of myself and my views about the world. But one pleasing element of my Polish stint in the 1990s has been on my mind rather a lot lately, namely the way in which I was able to decide how much I wanted to care about the politics and society of the country in which I was a guest.

The best example of this that I can think of now concerns the Polish Presidential election of 1995, the final round of which was contested by the incumbent Lech Wałęsa and the eventual winner, Aleksander Kwaśniewski. I looked on with interest at the increasing liveliness and rancour of the debates between the candidates themselves, between some of my Polish friends and between the young people to whom it was my task to teach English. I did find myself picking a side to some extent. But I cared far less deeply about that election than I had about previous elections back home in the UK. I was an interested outsider, sure. But still an outsider. A guest. A visitor. Not too much skin in the game.

This is on my mind again now, as is the whole wider business of living away from this sceptr'd isle because of an escape plan being hatched here at this is my england HQ. It's too early to say whether it will work out, and there are good reasons to suppose that it may not, but the intention here is to relocate to an attractive corner of Spain before this year is over. Should it all play out as hoped, we look forward to both the obviously pleasant business of adjusting to better weather and lower costs and to the many tricky little challenges likely to crop up. The idea with regard to the latter is to consider them as brain food, as opportunities to stimulate the ageing grey matter. Along the way, I would expect to experience once again the pleasing business of taking a cool, academic interest in the local politics, free from the hot, helpless anger that grips me pretty much every time I watch the news here at home. But perhaps I can be even more optimistic than that, partly because of what I took from a recent New York Times article about the electoral success of populist, nationalist and far-right neofascist political parties across Europe, an issue brought into sharp focus this week by the closeness of the Austrian Presidential election lost so narrowly by the far-right candidate Norbert Hofer. The graphic below (which is interactive and rather more informative on the page of the article itself) reveals a striking fact: that of the twenty countries examined in the piece, only those on the Iberian peninsula have not seen some level of parliamentary representation for these populist, nationalist and neofascist forces. So maybe that warm corner of Spain is precisely where I should be right now, retreating from events happening further to the north and east. Fingers crossed, then. 

INVITING US NOT TO CARE

More stuff from the remaindered books outlet which yielded the tiny Jon Ronson gem praised here last week. Another slimline volume. History this time. A short account of the Vietnam War. Not a subject I usually think about a lot. But it came up here quite recently when considering remarks made by Charles Bukowski in 1973 in response to television coverage of freed POWs returning from Indochina: 

"The POW propaganda plant is still grinding against all sensibilities. We lost the war, got our asses kicked out by starving men and women half our size. We couldn't bomb, con or beg them into submission so we got out and while getting out, somebody had to come up with a smokescreen to make the populace forget we got our asses kicked." 

Bukowski reminds us of how US media outlets focus so sharply on the American casualties of the conflicts into which that great nation so often wades, while saying far less about the vastly more numerous deaths of local civilians caught in the crossfire. These thoughts led me to the discovery of a 2012 article in which John Tirman discusses the question of why US citizens appear inclined to ignore the civilians killed in "American wars". Tirman notes that  "the lack of concern about those who die in U.S. wars is... shown by these civilians' absence, in large part, from our films, novels and documentaries" and that "the entertainment industry portrays these wars... almost always with a focus on Americans."

I don't think it's fair to single out the USA as the only nation where this approach to describing armed conflict is the norm. My sense is that here in the UK, for example, the media and entertainment industries similarly combine to create narratives in which foreign civilians and enemy combatants are pushed towards the margins and the background.

One would hope, though, that history books authored in the countries on one side of a conflict would pay more attention to the civilian casualties sustained by the other side, as well as attempting to explore the perspectives of the people living on that other side. I'd like to keep nursing that hope, notwithstanding old warnings about there being no such thing as a truly neutral, objective or even-handed historian. At first sight, though, this recently acquired book about the Vietnam War seemed to suggest that its account of the conflict would be in keeping with John Tirman's observations about a lack of concern for the civilian victims of wars contested by the USA: the cover is illustrated with a photo of an American soldier's helmet; the blurb on the back of the book speaks of 58,220 American dead and 300,000 American wounded, without mentioning equivalent figures for the Vietnamese population. True, the middle paragraph of that blurb does suggest that the author has attempted to tell the story of the war from the Vietnamese perspective, noting that for "the people of North Vietnam is was just another in a long line of foreign invaders" and observing that "for two thousand years they had struggled for self-determination". But that insistence on citing the numbers of American casualties only does create the impression that this book is yet another predominantly US-centric account of the conflict. It is a pity that the publisher's people felt the need to take this approach, and they have done the Scottish author of the book a disservice, I feel, because the opening chapters do say rather more about the Vietnamese perspective than the blurb and the cover image had led me to expect. I feel, then, that the publisher's marketing people decided that they needed to sideline Indochinese civilians, combatants, history and politics in order to package a palatable product for an audience endlessly invited not to care about dead foreigners. The disservice done by this approach, then, is done not only to the author but also to those of us with the capacity to feel for the fallen on both sides of a conflict.

POOLS APART

We are now up in St. Augustine, Florida, having guided the rented Jeep up I-95 from the more familiar CDP where one of my sets of in-laws can be found. For the last stretch of the journey north, we left the Interstate, preferring the coast-hugging A1A, which passes by pastel-shaded and often staggeringly large holiday homes. The shining, turquoise Atlantic surged onto a long stretch of bright sand. We stopped for lunch at a roadside place with bulging, good-tasting reuben sandwiches (although clearly better known for seafood), where I bloody nearly left my debit card behind again. Second time this trip. Same stunt pulled in a Manhattan trattoria when we were in chilly New York last week. I think I'm foxed by that American thing of taking your card away and then returning it to you in some kinda leatherette binder to conclude the payment process. I write on the tip, sign my name and then get up to leave, all without extracting my card. Well, I've done it twice in just over a week. Muscle memory kicking in? (i.e. the brain is foxed by the hands being asked to do something different from the routine I'm used to back home, i.e. POS machine brought to table, card handed back to me by waiter/waitress). Failure of ageing brain to access full range of restaurant schemata? whatevs. Just don't do it again, OK?

On arrival here, we headed straight for the pool deck of our quirky downtown hotel. A single Margarita each. A few pages of the book I'm reading right now. A few minutes of Church of Lazlo on 96.5 The Buzz from Kansas City (best radio show in the world; I ought to write about it properly some time soon). But, just as it should be, way more of the time spent splashing about in the cool water of the pool and the almost scalding water of the hot tub (murder, for the first few moments, on my sunburned shins) with my son.

He's a good lad. High-spirited, for sure. Testing the limits of what he can get away with saying and doing? Most definitely. But he seems to be considerate enough. On the way to being able to operate in human society without causing undue harm or upset. Maybe some of that is natural. But we do our part, guiding him towards a feeling for other people's feelings, towards an awareness of what's going on around him. So only a few words were needed to ensure he had fun without shouting the place down, knocking over someone's drink or soaking the pages of some other punter's holiday novel. 

Watching my son play thusly (i.e. nicely), my mind returned to the clubhouse pool at the gated community where we'd been staying for the preceding few days. It's well maintained. A good size. Lots of comfy furniture arranged around it. A short walk from my in-laws' house (though most other pool users prefer to arrive and leave on golf carts...). The schools here not being on a break, it's quiet on weekdays. Empty. Or maybe just a couple of retirees swimming laps or relaxing in the sunshine. But at weekends we expect there to be more people around. Folks with kids and whose houses don't have private pools. I'm not exactly known for vivaciousness and conviviality but my wife is a nicer person and my son gets on easily with other kids so it's all fine. Well, usually. But not this Sunday.

It wasn't the gaggle of 20-something/30-something adults without accompanying children that rattled me. They were OK, notwithstanding the execrable LeAnn Rimes-style music playing from their corner of the pool deck. It wasn't even the small group of boys in their early teens loudly tormenting each other with dull jibes and banging the fucking gates to the pool area over and over and over and over and over again. No, what turned our stomachs and turned us away was the strange, unpleasant sight of a rotund boy eating slice after slice of pizza WHILE STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING SWIMMING POOL. Not just eating pizza, mind you, but picking at it with his chubby fingers, discarding dispreferred pieces of topping and crust INTO THE FUCKING WATER. 

You're probably asking where his parents were, right? Nowhere in sight? No, no. Not the case. The massively obese dad was sitting by the pool, WATCHING his son's drooly gob and hungry jaws work on those pizza slices. Not just watching, though. Each time junior finished a slice, big daddy would struggle up from his chair and hand the boy another portion. WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK.

Of course I considered going over there to ask the big guy what the hell he was doing. But I thought about my father-in-law and wondered whether he would appreciate being drawn into a dispute with one of his neighbours over something happening in a pool he never uses himself. So I left it and we headed back to the house. No desire to swim around with bits of masticated pizza dough and slobbery pepperoni.

So I was reminded that loutish behaviour and terrible parenting are not (as some may have it) phenomena exclusively associated with the poor. The gated community into whose pool we saw pizza crumbs being deposited is not a cheap place to live. While the prices of the smaller houses are certainly not high by UK standards, the monthly charges (to cover maintenance of the facilities and immaculate landscaping) are eye-watering. So that shitty, shitty dad has money and lives in some comfort. He's better off, I'm sure, that most of the parents we'd seen the day before at a local water park. There, my sense was that the patrons were mostly people living in homes with no access to private pools. People of more modest means. Many of them Hispanic and speakers of English as a second language, in an area where we have only observed Hispanics working as gardeners and cleaners. Consider the demographics of the nearby settlement where my in-laws reside, the numbers strongly suggesting that those Hispanic labourers we see at work must be based in other, presumably less affluent, parts of the county:

The racial makeup of the CDP [is] 96.56% White, 1.08% African American, 0.13% Native American, 1.03% Asian, 0.40% from other races, and 0.79% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.77% of the population.

That apparently less affluent water park crowd, then? Having a good time with their kids without any sign of behaviour as thoughtless, selfish or unpleasant as the nonsense we saw a day later from monied fat-dad and his pizza-gobbling offspring. Funny, lovely, horrible, old world. 

WE ARE DROWNING IN FASCIST RIVERS OF SHIT

Earlier this week, former Channel 4 economics editor Paul Mason observed that "wherever the internet is not censored, it is awash with anger, stereotypes and prejudice". Mason's useful (if depressing) article discusses instances of both anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim agitation online and describes the forces behind them as "giant pumps of unreason, beating in opposite directions but serving the same purpose: to pull apart rational discourse and democratic politics."

I would take issue with the idea of treating Islam/Muslims on one hand and Judaism/Jews on the other as opposites. Not helpful. Uncharacteristically clumsy phrasing from Mason, perhaps. But his brief tour of the worst of the internet is otherwise well done, taking in a number of wearily familiar tropes: the conflation of many disparate conspiracy theories with one another and with Israel and Jews; the logic-resistant insistence of those who get all their information from Twitter, Reddit and shock jocks that nothing published by mainstream news sources is ever true.

Sometimes I have chosen to tangle with people of this sort, wondering whether their hot bile might be cooled and their ferocious invective quietened by being challenged to produce evidence for their wild claims. Another tactic involves inviting them to feel shame for being hatefully uncivilised or for the outright (and obvious) falsehoods they so often articulate. 

These falsehoods are served up as not only as words but also as photographs and illustrations. It does not take very much skill, after all, to find and misappropriate images from online sources. Not much more skill is needed annotate these images in order to use them in misleading ways.

Consider a charmless chap I stumbled upon today. Claiming to be a fellow of the Chartered Management Institute and a former member of the Royal Navy, this Cornishman is a rich source of the kind of material decried in Paul Mason's piece. Consider this tweet of his:

We are told that the children in the picture are nine-year old Austrian girls who have been "brutalised and raped" by "migrant Muslim teens". This is an obvious lie. Even a cursory glance shows that the photograph was clearly taken in a British primary school rather than in Austria. More damning, the picture can easily be identified as a stock photo licensed by Getty Images. It was used in 2013 to illustrate an Independent article about Michael Gove's approach to the primary curriculum:

Perhaps you don't take issue with this Twitter user for his antipathy towards Islam and Muslims. His prerogative, of course. But it's harder to look kindly on the kind of behaviour shown here. Consider how you would feel, for instance, if you recognised your own daughter in the photo attached to this person's tweet. Your daughter's image mislabelled as that of an Austrian rape victim by a grown man seeking to stoke up hostility towards Muslims. Despicable, isn't it?

He's a coward, too, this fellow. Predictably, when presented with the evidence of his clumsy and easily detected fabrication, @cuzzinharry deleted the offending tweet.

Using images of children to stir up hatred in this way is by no means a new thing. Joshua Bonehill-Paine of Yeovil, Somerset, a somewhat notorious self-styled "nationalist, fascist, theorist and supporter of white rights" used to be rather fond of the tactic prior to his current incarceration. The only time I can recall him interacting directly with me, for instance, he was tweeting via a handle called Find Tom Cunningham, which he'd set up purely to keep repeating an anti-Semitic smear involving a fictitious missing child having supposedly disappeared near a synagogue. This moronic reworking of the age-old blood libel was not Bonehill-Paine's first use of a "missing child" ruse. More than a year before the Find Tom Cunningham nonsense, he'd attracted the attention of the national press for a very similar stunt. All very much in character, because Bonehill-Paine is certainly the kind of person to whom Mason's term giant pump of unreason can be applied.

Calling out these grim provocateurs can be exhausting work. They tend to be relentless and obsessive. As well as being tiring, moreover, these efforts almost always seem to be fruitless. Never more so than when running up against the ceaselessly parroted contention that to challenge the screed of a troll is to stand in opposition to "free speech". I am reminded here of a recent article by US journalist Chris Hedges, who worries about the number of people in the USA gravitating towards a new American fascism. 

These Americans want a kind of freedom - a freedom to hate. They want freedom to use words like "nigger", "kike", "spic", "chink", "raghead" and "fag". They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture. They want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate historical movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave. And they want the freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy.

This is not solely an American phenomenon, of course. Here in the UK we have plenty of online bullyboys who like to bang on about "free speech" while proposing to use that freedom for nothing more constructive than articulating hatred or harassing people. Bonehill-Paine is hardly unique.

Another notable British example of the type, then, is Peter Nunn, the Bristol LGV driver (he calls himself a "businessman") who did some jail time in 2014 for directing filthy, threatening and very sinister remarks via Twitter towards Stella Creasy MP and the journalist Caroline Criado-Perez. On emerging from prison, Nunn returned to his social media accounts, using them to masquerade, unconvincingly, as a self-styled free speech campaigner. In this role, Nunn leaps to the defence of others who, like him, have found themselves facing legal difficulties arising from the horrible things they write online. Nunn's white knight role, however, is nothing more than a disingenuous piss-take, as evidenced by the fact that those he defends are always particularly egregious trolls. One such is Chloe Cowan, a woman who has admitted in court to the deeply distasteful and upsetting trolling of Denise Fergus, mother of murdered Liverpool toddler James Bulger. Another toxic dingbat praised by Nunn is Chris Spivey, a man given a suspended jail term for persistently harassing the family of the murdered soldier, Fusilier Lee Rigby. Then there's John Nimmo of South Shields, who shares with Nunn the dubious honour of having been jailed for sending sinister threats to Ms. Criado-Perez. Predictably, Peter Nunn has offered warm words of support for the dismal Nimmo.

In every case, Nunn describes these nasty characters as "free speech activists". Sometimes he calls them "satirists".  He is, of course, alluding to the fact that this is how he chooses to present himself, which is a truly ludicrous conceit.

These antics would be unpleasant enough even if no tangible ill-effects resulted from Nunn's cheerleading for the likes of Cowan, Spivey and Nimmo. But it is my contention that Peter Nunn is capable of encouraging those he praises beyond the point of caution and towards real and damaging consequences of their spite. When Joshua Bonehill-Paine, for example, was careering maniacally towards his current stint in prison, he was encouraged to proceed on his reckless course by people who chose to offer him succour. Young Joshua appears to be a badly damaged and sadly confused person. Seemingly not unintelligent, he has nevertheless been making an arse of himself and getting into trouble with the law since 2011. In the years that followed, Bonehill-Paine's stunts became ever more ludicrous and ever more venomous. All the while, he was cheered on by the likes of Peter Nunn.

Goading a vulnerable, unemployable youth towards repeated humiliation and prison is a horrible business. Disingenuously lauding that youth as a supposed champion of free speech then adds insult to injury.

But I don't believe Peter Nunn is the worst of the people irresponsible enough to make a sport of encouraging a young man towards his eventual custodial sentence. After all, Nunn's own life appears to have sustained pretty serious damage as a result of his trolling antics. So perhaps he is incapable of better judgement and of consistent decency and is therefore to be pitied as much as condemned.

Worse, in my view, are those who egged on Bonehill-Paine without ever seeming to suffer real consequences themselves. Imagine, if you will, a grown man old enough to have fathered children who are now adults. Imagine this father of grown adults lacking the compassion and the good judgement to refrain from encouraging a confused, damaged young person to continue along a path of self-destruction. I don't have to imagine this person because he exists. Every time Bonehill-Paine set up some new Twitter account, this guy (joined by Peter Nunn) would be among the first to show up in its list of followers. Each time young Joshua did something poisonously stupid, this grown man would wear the mask of an apparently reasonable person, coolly justifying Bonehill-Paine's lunacy in terms of (you guessed it) "free speech". The guy I'm thinking of is named Michael Faulkner. He resides in Rainham, Essex. One of his hobbies seems to be Pixie Lott fandom and interacting online with fellow (younger, female) Pixie Lott fans. That's a little odd. But it's probably harmless. Unlike his other hobby of slyly encouraging self-loathing misfits like Joshua Bonehill-Paine to cause harm to themselves and to others. For that, Mr. Faulkner ought to be ashamed of himself. It's a horrible thing to do - and just another piece of shit floating down the wide river of horror recently described to us by writers such as Paul Mason and Chris Hedges.

POTEMKIN VILLAGES DE NOS JOURS

Early days when it comes to a recently acquired book about Russians opposed to the rule of Putin. I've not yet turned as many pages as I'd like. This is not because the book appears to be uninteresting or otherwise heavy going. It's more a case that finding the time to read purely for pleasure continues to be a bit tricky due, I think, to a combination of factors: the nonsensical deadlines and weird hours of my currently (interim/temporary) BULLSHIT JOB; fair chunks of remaining free time spent pounding a treadmill, jumping onto boxes, curling the biceps etc.; a bit of running around to prepare for the keenly anticipated mega-vacation in the USA.

But just a short way into Panyushkin's Twelve Who Don't Agree, one strange detail caught my eye, sharpening my keenness to read on and learn more. The author, a Russian journalist, describes a St. Petersburg protest march which he covered in 2007:

"A line formed that was no fun to stand in. According to long tradition, the authorities drove a couple of hundred homeless to every opposition rally for the purpose of displaying the drunken riffraff who constituted Putin's opponents. In exchange for participating in the country's political life, the homeless demand vodka but not to be allowed to wash."

Thus far, I've not managed to Google up any other references to the practice alleged here to be a be a "long tradition" for Russia's security forces. Whether or not this actually is a real tactic used by the Kremlin & co. to discredit those who organise against the regime, the image is a colourful one, reminiscent of other ruses that come to mind.

For example, I'm reminded of a recent UK news story, reporting that Transport for London engineers were instructed to waste time digging a superfluous hole near Northumberland Park station purely to serve as a prop for a photoshoot involving George Osborne and Zac Goldsmith.

Turning my thoughts back to Putin's Russia, this idea of creating a completely false impression of how things really are by means of logistically complex dissembling reminds me, naturally enough, of the concept of the Potemkin Village. As I make further progress with Panyushkin's book, let's see if more elaborate, sinister ridiculousness of this sort is alleged and described. 

EVEN THE COLD-HEARTED SHOULD WELCOME CHILDREN

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes looked one hundred years into the future and predicted a world in which the citizens of developed countries would work less and have far more leisure time. With under fourteen years to go, it seems unlikely that this prediction will come true within the time scale set out by Keynes. There's a good chance, in fact, that you are reading this and feeling sure that your leisure hours are dwindling, eroded by your job and by the technologies which enable your job to bleed into the time you used to call your own. The working people in your household, moreover, may well be feeling under pressure to work more in order to meet the rising costs of maintaining the standard of living you and your dependants have come to expect. Of these costs, childcare could very well be among the more worrisome concerns. It's quite likely, then, that you have read numerous newspaper articles decrying the costs and availability of the childcare provision so many people need in order to keep working the jobs that pay for all the stuff and all the services we've been taught to think of as indispensable.

One such article appeared in The Guardian this weekend. Many of the comments below the line were of a horribly familiar nature, the gist of them being  "if parents cannot afford to have children, they shouldn't have them." One charming person used exactly that set of words, in fact. In response, I asked that commenter if he was in favour of Britain having a shrinking, ageing population and a shrinking economy to go with it. Another person then asked me a question which seemed to suggest that the thinking behind my question had not been expressed clearly enough:

"What a strange way to justify having children......are they now being seen as an economic benefit?"

So I explained that, as a parent myself, I know my wife and I did not factor any economic calculation when decided we wanted to have a child together. So why did we have a child? Well, I don't think there's just one reason and I'm guessing that the (pretty much subconscious) workings of our minds were in tune with those of most other parents: the idea of the conception of a child being an act of love; the feeling that being caring, loving parents is a natural, fulfilling part of most people's lives.

But my understanding is that in the poorest parts of the world, one very compelling reason for having children is absolutely an economic consideration.

I remember visiting Bangladesh for a conference a few years ago. Although it was not the main focus of that event, one of the topics under discussion was connected with roles for technology in the alleviation of poverty. In covering this, one speaker explained how even in the twenty-first century, many poor people continue to think of children as future labourers able to supplement the family income. We were told that it doesn't take all that long for the early costs of feeding a small child to be outweighed by the uplift in income. This, we learned, is because children commonly begin to provide income by the age of five, and because all such children contribute way more than they consume by around the age of ten. The speaker opined that for these poor families, though, the real benefit kicks in once the parents' ability to earn income and feed themselves is declining with age. At this stage, we were informed, their children become the primary breadwinners. We were reminded that these are people with no bank accounts, savings or pensions.

Understanding this has NOT made me believe that children born to poor people around the developing world are conceived ONLY as a result of a rational calculation of their economic value. Moreover, I am sure that such parents love their kids. But the economic imperative does seem to be there.

Here in the UK, I think most of us do not consciously think of parenthood in this way. Living as we do, for the most part, in warm, well-lit, dry and comfortable homes and with more than sufficient food, we can afford to believe that economic considerations are not at work when we decide to have kids. That said, won't most of us eventually need our offspring to make arrangements for our care in our old age? Won't our last years be a bit more comfortable if our children are there to do for us the things we can no longer do for ourselves?

Back, then, to the question which was put to me in the comments section of that Guardian piece:

"What a strange way to justify having children......are they now being seen as an economic benefit?"

On balance, I completely agree with what I think the questioner was suggesting: that it seems cold, grim and distasteful to think of having children as being only or mainly to do with economics.

The fact remains, though, that this country is one of many developed nations facing a demographic time-bomb. Not that long from now, retirees will outnumber wage-earning, tax-paying contributors to economic growth, I believe.

So when someone contends that "if parents can not afford to have children, they shouldn't have them", I tend to infer that I'm speaking with someone who does link having children very strongly with economic considerations. I then tend to appeal to the apparently cold, pragmatic views of that person by bringing up the economic imperative for a country like ours to keep producing enough kids. It seems a safer bet than trying to appeal to an apparently absent feeling for the more emotional side of deciding to become a parent!

NO SPECIAL QUALITY OF HEROISM

As discussed little while ago, I recently picked up the latest(?) posthumously assembled collection of never-before-seen (and previously-not-widely-seen) stuff by Charles Bukowski. Yet another volume for the collection.

Last time, I referred to The Bell Tolls for No One as a ragtag collection of short stories. But, having finally read the whole book now (I'm reading for pleasure much less often and much more slowly these days), I see that it's perhaps better to describe it as a mishmash of short pieces of writing.

Yes, of the various forms you will find between the covers of this collection, (familiar!) little stories grown from the kernels of real incidents in Bukowski's life are the most numerous. Yes, also well-represented here are small bits of dirty, ludicrous, fantastical fiction, each one realised over just a few pages: a factory worker shares an apartment with an ageing Adolph (sic) Hitler who is planning to populate the world with horrible creatures born of bathtub flatulence; a cop is kidnapped by a cast of grotesque, Rabelaisian and murderous criminals residing in a crumbling Hollywood mansion; in two separate but strikingly similar stories, mid-air havoc is wreaked by savage, perverted n'er-do-wells terrorising commercial flights.

But among all this fiction, we can discover think pieces that Bukowski contributed to underground newspapers such as Open City. Even in this context, the author tends towards anecdotes of a highly personal nature rather than towards pronouncing on the important and popularly discussed issues of the time.

But in the pages of The Bell Tolls for No One we do find one example of a form that Bukowski almost never used, namely straight socio-political commentary conveying a definite set of opinions presented plainly and unambiguously. This appears as the first part of a 1973 L.A. Free Press column, which does soon revert to something closer to one of the author's usual preferred forms, in this case a first person account of a friend telling a surreal yarn. But for a page-and-a-half, Bukowski writes about the then highly topical issue of American prisoners of war left behind in Vietnam:

The POW propaganda plant is still grinding against all sensibilities. We lost the war, got our asses kicked out by starving men and women half our size. We couldn't bomb, con or beg them into submission so we got out and while getting out, somebody had to come up with a smokescreen to make the populace forget we got our asses kicked. Let's build the POW angle, they said, and so it began. Bob Hope became concerned about the POWs; his wartime Santa Claus kick had rather petered out in the last two trips. The word was out and the act was in. The arrival of the first POWs was put on tv. Here came the plane in. And we waited and waited and the plane taxied and taxied. You never saw a plane taxi that much in any airport at any time in the world. The cameras waited and they bled it to death. Then out came the first grand POW and patriotism was back. 

These words written in the early 1970s took me back to the mid-1980s and to the first time I had any notion of a war in Vietnam having taken place. I was in my mid teens. Paul Hardcastle's 19 hit the  top of pop charts here in Britain and in many other countries. I clearly recall that several of our broadsheet newspapers took this as a cue to run Sunday supplement pieces on the Vietnam War. Up to then, then, I had been only dimly aware of this war. Fair enough. After all, the conflict had spluttered to its untidy conclusion when I was just five years old. I don't remember my parents speaking about it and it certainly hadn't been covered as part of the history curriculum at school. 

Something about the madness, the pointlessness and ugliness of America's ill-fated adventure in Indochina caught my adolescent imagination. So I went on to watch the movies Apocalypse Now and Platoon and the TV series Tour of Duty with morbid interest. Little by little, it dawned on me that all of these works of fiction seemed to be presenting Americans (if not America) as (the) victims of this war. Little by little, it occurred to me to wonder why the suffering and the deaths of Vietnamese combatants and civilians is passed over so lightly in these films and TV shows. Were they not victims too? If you really want to get into it, didn't the people of Vietnam suffer rather more badly than the fighting men of the USA? 

In those movies and TV series we see American conscripts and professional soldiers broken, brutalised and horrified by the things they see and do. We see American families and communities traumatised by grief for their dead or by the psychological and physical damage sustained by returning veterans. So we should, because, undeniably, tours of duty in Vietnam did ruin the minds and bodies of many American men. Men of modest means, on the whole, of course. Men whose families did not have the connections and wealth enjoyed by the parents of draft-dodgers such as Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

In those movies we see American men dying in battle too, of course. So we should, because around 60,000 US service personnel lost their lives during the Vietnam War. 

Big numbers, yes. Horrible things, definitely. Big, bitter divisions in American society. So of course it's a big deal. Of course movies and TV dramas have explored this American suffering. But are these really big numbers when set side-by-side with a tally of dead and wounded Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people? No. Decidedly not. Because between 400,000 and 900,000 North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong personnel died in the war. Around 250,000 members of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (America's allies) were killed. Civilian deaths? Estimates vary wildly, but most seem to place the number at well over 1.5 million.

In this context, wouldn't a truly compassionate account of the Vietnam War focus to some degree on the suffering of the Vietnamese people as well as on the miseries of American servicemen? But I think about those movies and TV shows. As far as I recall, the makers of these fictional accounts of the war make no meaningful attempt to convey the scale of the horror visited upon the people of Vietnam and neighbouring countries. This makes it hard not to form the impression that Hollywood doesn't give a fuck about dead foreign civilians.

I am not alone in arriving at this conclusion. In a 2012 article which asks a wider question about why Americans ignore the civilians killed in "American wars", John Tirman notes that "the lack of concern about those who die in U.S. wars is... shown by these civilians' absence, in large part, from our films, novels and documentaries" and that "the entertainment industry portrays these wars... almost always with a focus on Americans."

For my own part, I believe I am capable of sustaining a compassionate response to the plight of the Vietnamese dead and wounded and to the tribulations of conscripted men from poor neighbourhoods across America. I'd certainly welcome a novel, movie or TV drama on the theme of the Vietnam war which invites and allows me to experience both feelings at once. But I do understand why others might consider the existing Hollywood and TV treatments of the Vietnam war and grow weary of being expected to sympathise only with the battered and blooded GIs. It was with this in mind that I read on as as Bukowski continued with his reaction to the return of American POWs:

A POW is a man who went to war knowingly, knowing he might kill or be killed, capture of be captured, maim or be maimed. These is no special quality of heroism in this. There are few real patriots anymore, there have been too many useless wars and they have come too fast.

Most American men of war age merely took a gamble; they figured by going that the odds against them actually getting killed were high. By going and returning, whether they believed in the war or not, they would still retain their decent citizen status and be able to return to their women and their jobs and their homes and their baseball games, their new cars. By refusing they faced imprisonment and/or hiding.

Most weighed it all and considered that going to war was the easier way, especially those with college educations and ROTC training who were able to fly above the muck and blood, only pushing buttons. That some of them became POWs was just tough shit of the spinning of the wheel and they know it better than anybody. And if they are given a free fuck now or a free automobile or applause or a good  job, they're going to take that too.

The other night at the Olympic Auditorium boxing matches, a former POW was introduced and he got up into the ring and was given a standing ovation. I once had an almost-admiration for boxing fans. I now see them in a different magenta lavender brownsmear hue...