America [11]

        For two or three generations, the default cultural consensus has been that it is better to be nice than to be nasty. Which must be really uncomfortable if you are one of the nasty people. Imagine living in a world where every children’s book has a message that kindness is good; that you can do anything if you try, and you shouldn’t pick on people who are different from you, when, with every fibre of your being, you believe that kindness is a sign of weakness, that most people are inferior beta zombies who will never amount to anything however much they try and should damn well accept it, and that it is your absolute patriotic duty to be horrible to people who are different.

        Years ago I laughed at an evangelical book that said that the Smurfs were Satanic because one of them was a magician; and that My Little Pony was Satanic because there were pastel coloured unicorns in the book of Daniel; and that the Care Bears were Satanic because the message was that you should do your best to be nice when actually there is no point in trying to be nice without the blood and grace of the lawd jee-zus. [1]

The political Right must feel that way about the entirety of western popular culture.

What must it be like, truthfully feel attacked or threatened because Norman Osborne, who is a white man in the comic, is a black man in the new Spider-Man cartoon? What must it be like to turn on a new Star Wars show and honestly feel that the fourteen year old Ravi Cabot-Conyers is, by his very existence, part of a plot against America? To describe a live action version of a cartoon version of a Grimms’ Fairy Tale as “the wokest movie ever made”? And to honestly believe that these are not isolated incidences of racially sensitive casting, but part of an orchestrated anti-Caucasian conspiracy. To feel in short that the whole world is against you?

I guess, like being a Black person or a gay person for most of the twentieth century. I adore classic Doctor Who: but for almost the whole of the original run, the BBC were operating an anti-diversity, anti-inclusivity, anti-equality programme. They didn’t call it that; there were no boxes to tick, but it never occurred to them that there was any other way of doing things.

I think that there is a very real possibility that the boot will soon be on the other foot. Diversity, Equality and Inclusiveness will be swept away. In its place, there will be Uniformity, Inequality and Exclusivity. When the next Doctor Who is a white male, many of us will think that this is the result of a political agenda, even a conspiracy.

And this time, it will be true.

People sometimes ask “why are there no anti-woke movies?” in the same way that they sometimes ask “why are there no right-wing comedians?”; and the answer is the same in both cases. It is very hard to tell a funny joke that says “Isn’t the President doing a great job! Aren’t policemen brilliant! I was on the bus the other day and there was no nutter sitting next to me!” I suppose a very rich comedian might get up in front of a very rich audience and say “Isn’t it funny that poor people are poor?” but it doesn’t strike me as an obvious comic vein to mine.

“Why was the oil company that wanted to pull down the Muppets’ theatre portrayed as the bad guy?” “Why was Dickens biased against Scrooge?” I think that in most stories at most times the good guy will be empathic, polite and not-a-Nazi because that is almost exactly what we mean by good.

I am not going to take an unholy oath that if Disney adopt a UIE agenda then I will boycott the company in perpetuity. If Steve Rogers is replaced by “Captain America, Muslim Basher” (who fights Captain Sharia and his nefarious plot to make the streets of New York flow with curry) then the question of a boycott won’t arise.

I am not boycotting Twitter; I just don’t read it any more because there is nothing on it worth reading. I won’t necessarily type “Not my Captain America”, but he won’t be.

I am not, and never have been, an anarchist. I like rules; I like structure. I am the sort of person who is inclined to ask “Why is no-one in charge here?” about a work-place. On the other hand, I am opposed to nearly all forms of punishment, and one possible definition of anarchism is “without coercion”.

There is a theory that when the first Christians talked about the Kingdom, they didn’t mean a place in the sky where they would eat pie when they died, nor a future state of this world when the righteous (the really genuinely righteous) were in charge. The Kingdom was themselves, how they were living, as well as they could, right here, right now. “The Kingdom of God is spread out over the earth and people don’t see it” as Jesus almost certainly didn’t say.

There is a romantic idea that the best thing you can do to make the world beautiful is to live a beautiful life right here, right now. Which is much easier if you are Oscar Wilde and much harder if you are a London chimney sweep. And much, much easier if you are a middle class blogger in Bristol than a child in a hospital in Gaza.

I sometimes think that if I were younger, I would, simply drop out. Although when I was younger, I didn’t, so I probably wouldn’t. Unless hanging out in a bedsit in Tooting Bec counts as dropping out. But maybe I can drop out conceptually.

I will reduce my reliance on the Internet. In particular I will back up my online writing to physical media. I will look at putting my words into physical books. At the very least, I can see myself as having provided a testimony of what went wrong in the last days of our civilisation for the people at the beginning of the next one.

“How will you turn the things you wrote on the internet into books, Andrew?”

Using a print-on-demand company that I found on the internet.

“But there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Andrew, dear Andrew.”

I will at any rate diversify the online platforms on which my work appears, so that if Google falls, there will be alternative streams.

I will look for outlets and sources of culture at a grass roots, community level. I went to a workshop about storytelling and was said to show promise, but haven’t taken it further. I have started to sing songs at folk-sessions, rarely in key, but other people clap, sometimes without irony. I once said frivolously, that the real sequels to Star Wars were the ones that were played out on my bedroom floor when I was twelve or on college gaming tables when I was twenty four: I ought to start living that.

I don’t care to belong to any church that would accept me as a member. I am too pagan for the Christians but too Christian for the pagans. But still.

I will be nice to people.

I will do my best to understand diversity and difference and what is appropriate and inappropriate and in general try not to be a complete bastard.

I will look for physical analogues for the Internet which I can retreat to if idea space is occupied by MUKGA and UID. There would be something very post-apocalyptic if I ended up giving photocopied fanzines to strangers in coffee shops.

In the very short term, this means publishing my writing in books and pseudo-books like this one. In the medium term it means obtaining a better laser printer. [2] In the long term, is there any argument for obtaining an old fashioned manual typewriter? If we are reduced to writing longhand with a quill pen, then I am well and truly fucked.

“But, Andrew, you will still be hopelessly compromised, and so will all the things you love: and your focus on culture and idea space is going to seem very trivial when the bombs actually start falling, or when the jackboots actually start arresting people.”

Remember those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War?

But I think that is where I am.

I haven’t said any of the things I wanted to say but putting this down has been therapeutic. I shouldn’t think more than seventeen people will read this to the end. Probably the same seventeen people who got to the end of Dave Sim’s Torah commentaries.

I am going to mostly stop reading the news. Oh boy. Ignore Trump and Badenoch and Farage. I don’t need to know that Starmer wants to make Trump an honorary member of the Royal Family.

I am going to concentrate on Not Being a Nazi to the best of my ability until the world ends.

I am going back to my happy place. My next project will take me back to my beloved 1978 season of Doctor Who; the one after that will involve the Marvel Comics of 1966. [3] And in the day-to-day there are pubs where people sings songs and small theatres where people do Shakespeare plays and some people have even said I am quite good at my day job.

Trump is a cancer. It is sometimes a good choice to learn to live as well as you can with cancer, than to perform surgery that probably will not cure it and will certainly ruin whatever time you have left.

Keep calm and carry on.

Live as much like a Narnian as you can.

Stay loyal to the dream.

Be excellent to each other.

Have respect for those around you and try not to be a dick.

Keep hoping machine running.

[1]  Turmoil in the Toybox was a very silly book: but a lot of people read my satires and agreed that nothing has a subtext, or that cute things don’t have subtexts, which wasn’t the main take-away point.

[2]   Will the free speech absolutists allow me to own a laser printer? I believe the former Soviet Union banned Gestneters.

[3]    Having said that is what I am going to do, I can almost guarantee that I will do something else. Did I mention that there may be a three letter abbreviation for this kind of thing?

If you have enjoyed this series of essays, please consider supporting me on Patreon, from $5 a month.