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. 

ROLL OF HONOUR

from time to time it's fun to review the list of people who have chosen to block this is my england on Twitter. this was last done back in May 2015. couple of observations, then, about today's update: new entries are marked with an asterisk; new entry may not mean the blocking has happened recently - could be the case I've only just noticed or only just remembered. here they are then...

• Stacy Herbert*
• Stewart Jackson MP*
• Raheem Kassam*
• David Vance*
• Louise Mensch
• Nadine Dorries
• Guido Fawkes
• Grace Dent
• George Galloway
• Nick Griffin
• Douglas Carswell
• Toby Young
• James Delingpole
• Melanie Phillips
• Jay Bothroyd
• Mike Gaukin
• Joshua Bonehill-Paine (several incarnations thereof)
• Tim Lovejoy
• Fraser Nelson
• Max Keiser
• Ian Millard

as ever, I'd like to confirm that these folks were not on the wrong end of expletive-dotted abuse or, indeed, anything genuinely abusive. interesting to note how many of the above, though, are self-proclaimed free speakers, notoriously sharp-tongued or otherwise supposedly inclined towards the rough and tumble of a robust discussion.

TREADMILL TUNES 003

the Florida gated community we are calling home for the next few days is well equipped with stuff we don't use (golf course, boat dock) and stuff we do (large, shallow swimming pool; small, neat gym). in said gym I am adjusting to the treadmill counting my progress in miles rather than km and my speed in mph rather than kph. it's doable. so ahead of a few other physical jerks this sunny morning, I put in somewhere between two and three miles. during all this activity I was kept company by:

• Years and Years: King [2015]
• Brass Construction: Movin' [1975] 
• Lafayette Afro Rock Band: Hihache [1973]
• The Brothers Johnson: Strawberry Letter 23 [1977]
• Candi Staton: Young Hearts Run Free [1976]
• Porter Robinson ft. Urban Cone: Lionhearted [2014]
• Fred Westley: Funk for your Ass [2008] 

HIGHLY ORGANIZED SITES OF MASS CONSUMPTION

almost five years ago, this blog mentioned a mooted photography project planned by two guys named Sean Litchfield and Zachary Violette. the project was to involve making fine-art photographs in "the Bush-era suburbs around the Bible-belt city of Greenville, South Carolina." it turns out that it was never successfully funded. but I sometimes think about it. especially when I am down here in south Florida visiting relatives and getting some sun. prior to reading the project blurb, I was struggling to articulate my impressions of (and feelings about) the American suburbia I'd started seeing up close when these Florida visits became a part of my life from 2003 onwards. previously, the America of my experience consisted of the places I had seen on a rather dimly recalled greyhound bus exploration of the country, undertaken and enjoyed (mostly) when I was a much younger man. well, not just cities. I also saw a lot of open road, glimpsed a lot of small towns and took in some staggering scenery out west. but since the first trip to Boynton Beach in 2003 (we now come to a spot a bit further north), I have come to think of deep, wide, smooth-textured suburbia as my "real" America. as the norm. as the backdrop to the archetypal American lives presented on TV commercials and whatnot. marketed. medicated. veneered. straightened. all these boxes of varying sizes - the houses, the drive-thru whatevers, the strip mall stores, the chain restaurants etc. - all arranged along wide, bright, tree-lined and shrub-fringed grids: they seem, to me, to add up to what Litchfield and Violette described as "highly-organized sites of mass consumption" which have "removed Americans even further from the pastoral landscape the whole suburban experiment was about in the first place."

FLORIDA JOGGING TUNES

no treadmill today. instead, I spent 20-something morning minutes pounding the winding TERRACES, DRIVES, WAYS and TRAILS of an immaculately manicured gated community in Florida. dew on the golf course. men in khaki shorts taking their dogs for a spin. the whir of early commuters swishing past in brand new SUVs or convertibles. keeping me company as I cantered around were:

• Smif-N-Wessun: Buck Town [1994]
• Ohio Players: Skin Tight [1974]
• Eminem: Without Me [2002]
• Average White Band: Pick Up the Pieces [1974] 
• Hot Chip: Over and Over [2006]

HELLO BROOKLYN

a fleeting first visit to NYC's most populous borough. arrived in a hurry, yellowcabwise, over the Brooklyn Bridge, having quick-schlepped on foot and into a biting wind all the way from our east midtown Manhattan hotel to the seaport district trattoria where I'd eaten very good saltimbocca the night before. back there because I'd left my bastard debit card on the table when stumbling, exhausted, towards a taxi and bed. back there on foot because the lad and I were both up for covering all that distance pedestrian-style and thereby getting a better appreciation for the shifting looks of the neighbourhoods. all very good and the little guy didn't complain once. but it left it a bit tight, perhaps, to make it from the trattoria to the Barclay's Center in time for the start of our first ever in-the-flesh NBA game, a dead rubber affair between two weaker teams, the hometown NETS and the visiting PELICANS. hence the taxi indulgence. worth it because the trip over the bridge is big on visual impact. the home team duly trounced and the our new NBA experience thusly digested, we mooched briefly on the streets of Brooklyn, observing the strata of established grittiness and more recently overlaid gentrification around Atlantic Avenue and environs. normally I would have photographed the heck out of everything. but not this time, alas, because it was very cold and I was in charge of a young fellow whose patience was wearing a little thin as we waited for our dinner companions to arrive from Manhattan ahead of the day-ending meat feast at a barn full of BBQ. tearing into burger flesh and dripping garnishes all over the place, I channelled scary Frank Booth with my beer choice: "Heineken?! Fuck that shit!" etc.  

SUNDAY MORNING STROLL

NYC LOOK UP

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.

TREADMILL TUNES 002

another treadmill stint this morning. same drill as last time. keeping an eye on the gut and the love handles etc. to get a sense of whether this routine will deliver on its promise of efficient fat burning. as ever, music is needed. shuffled up by the phone today were:

• Buckshot LeFonque: Hotter Than Hot [1994]
• Isaac Hayes: Theme from "Shaft" [1971]
• Wailing Souls: Ishen Tree [1981]
• St Germain: La Goutte D'Or [2000]
• Bobby Womack: Across 110th Street [1972]
• Earth, Wind & Fire: Boogie Wonderland [1979]
• C.J. & Co.: Devil's Gun [1977]