America (4)

If you decide that it is a bad idea for children to have head-lice, then one of the things you might do is introduce a programme of checking children’s hair and giving them anti-bacterial shampoo if they need it. They used to do that when we were at school. We were always told beforehand that nits actually preferred clean hair. It is perfectly possible, governments being what they are, that the programme got a bit too complicated, with too many forms to fill in and too many quotas to hit. Everyone has heard a story of an organisation that has done something stupid to fulfill a target. There was the war story about the regiment that was instructed to reduce the vermin infestation in the barracks, and found out that the only thing they could do to comply was to introduce some mice themselves and then obtain a regimental cat. Or the one about the remote Scottish island that was reprimanded for not having a programme in place to reduce traffic fatalities and had to point out that, er, they didn’t actually have any roads. So it might perfectly well be that someone says “This whole nit nurse thing has got too silly and expensive; we’re getting rid of it.” And it might turn out that once you have fired all the nit nurses there is no outbreak of head-lice, because the programme was trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist. And it might turn out that there are still just the same number of head-lice, because the problem was real but the programme was doing nothing to solve it. But if it turned out that the kids were no longer learning their twice-times tables because they were too busy scratching their itchy heads, you might well conclude that the programme, despite all the form filling and box ticking, had been a pretty good idea. Some people might think that metal combs were a gross invasion of personal liberty and that if a man can’t infest his own family’s hair with parasites in his own house then whose hair is he supposed to infest; or that head-lice are an invention by Big Shampoo; or that brushing children’s hair is a form of grooming and the next move will be to check them for pubic lice; or, at the other extreme, that this light-touch nit-nurse system is pandering to the head-lice brigade and the common sense approach would be shave the heads of everyone between the age of five and eighteen but the barbers’ shop lobby won’t let you say that sort of thing. I think that if the first thing you do when you get into power is abolish all the Anti Head-Lice policies, then one of three things is probably true.

1: You are very sure indeed that the Anti Head-Lice policies aren’t doing any good.

2: You are very sure indeed that Head-Lice don’t exist

3: You are positively in favour of Head-Lice and want children’s heads to be as full of them as possible.

I can’t see into the Dear Leader’s head, obviously. But I have noticed that the International Head-Lice Fan Club; the Royal Society for the Protection of Scalp Insects and the Pediculosis Capitis Breeders Association have all welcomed his anti Nit Nurse policies with open arms.

When John Lennon exposed himself on the cover of an album, his straight laced Auntie Mimi said, oh dear, that’s what he used to do on the beach to draw attention to himself when he was five years old.

I am not sure that this is the last word on artistic nudity, the Two Virgins album, or indeed aunties. But I agree with the implication. When a little child is deliberately silly, sometimes the best thing to do is to ignore them. And sometimes it is best to treat an over-indulged adult as if they were a silly child.

Also: I don’t think Yoko broke up the Beatles.

Cults and conspiracy theories, lacking actual evidence, look for hidden symbols and patterns. This could stand as the definition of a conspiracy theorist: “One who looks for hidden symbols and patterns and believes he has found them.” Your bus is late; you get the wrong sort of coffee in the cafe; private schools lose their charitable status; a Black man appears in Captain America: and you stare and stare and a pattern forms before your eyes and you say “That proves it! The illuminati!” Or, more likely, “the Jews”. [1] So I am very reluctant to make too much of symbols.

The Boys is a superhero story written by someone who doesn’t like superheroes. If you haven’t seen it, then it basically asks “What if Superman were Donald Trump”? Or possibly vice versa. It’s very gory and moderately indecent. The fourth season goes completely overboard in satirising Far Right conspiracy theorists. Going completely overboard is very much Garth Ennis’s stock in trade. I never quite got over the massively overweight pope accidentally crushing the mentally retarded Jesus to death in Preacher and I mean that in a very caring way. The fictional super-powered Christo-fascists in The Boys are perpetually pointing to absurd hidden messaging as if it was the purest common sense. “It’s a Pizza Parlour! And they serve Pepperoni! PPP! Pedophile! How more obvious can it be?”

Folk festivals often give out wrist bands rather than tickets, and ushers often want to see your wrist band before you enter a venue, so I have taken to raising my arm and saying “Hail, Caesar!” at these events. My, how everyone laughs! But we should take care. Is a raised open-handed salute necessarily a fascist signal? And does making a fascist signal necessarily mean that you are a fascist?

There were fourteen colonies in America. Ncuti Gatwa is the fourteenth Doctor Who. The French revolution is celebrated on the fourteenth of July. The Jewish Passover is celebrated on the fourteenth day of Nisan. The belief that Easter should be celebrated on that day has an official Latin name, quatrodecimism. The number fourteen scans really well, so in dirty folk songs gentlemen are inclined to hunt the Bonny Black Hare on the fourteenth of May rather than the seventeenth or the twenty second. The Titanic sank on the fourteenth day of April, and that was also the date of the Grapes of Wrath dust-storm. There are lots of reasons why someone might use the number fourteen symbolically. And it might just be an accident. There might just happen to have been fourteen green bottles on that particular wall. But when someone who has been (possibly) making Nazi salutes (apparently) waits until 14:14 to disseminate a message consisting of nothing but fourteen American flags. Well. You do start to wonder. [2]

If I was definitely not a duck, and if people kept accusing me of being a duck, and if I was very, very offended by the suggestion that I might be a duck, then I might try very hard, in public, not to do anything which someone else could possibly misconstrue as quacking.

Auntie Mimi could be right, after all. They may just be getting their political dicks out because it amuses them to cause the grown-ups consternation. Or because they are too innocent to know that what they are doing is something that you just don’t do in public. A child shouting “fuck” or calling the Black teacher “p*ki” may honestly not know why those words are prohibited, or mean anything by them. He may just be being naughty.

I was at college in the 1980s; during the whole Clause 29 thing and the whole miners’ strike thing and a huge schism about whether the Student Union ought to have an independent nuclear deterrent. You probably think that Ultra Vires is one of the less famous Transformers, but it was a really, really big deal at the time. There was a factional struggle between the Socialist Workers, the Official Student Socialist Party and the Student Socialist Movement for control of the Students Union and yes we had heard all the Life of Brian jokes.

But there were also some Conservative Students, although it is frankly hard to know why ex-Public School boys who had failed to get into Cambridge would have opted for Sussex as a second choice. I suppose there was no such thing as Clearing in those days; maybe we just had a really good Classics department. I’d rather Keir Starmer and Tony Blair stopped using the expression “Student Politics” to refer to anyone with socialist principles, but there is no question that the politics of students could get very silly indeed. If my parents had sent me to a fee-paying school, and if my accent were three notches posher than anyone else’s, then listening to earnest young purely theoretical Marxists in berets saying that people like me ought to be sent to the salt mines would have pissed me off as well. But I am convinced that the overwhelming majority of Campus Tories were trolls. They called for the re-criminalisation of homosexuality and the re-introduction of corporal punishment for the same reason they turned up to discos in three piece suits and attempted to order champagne from the bar. It was a form of retaliatory off-pissing; they were marking out their territory. If you had pressed them, they might have claimed that they were being ironic. You can hear the exact same tone of voice every time Boris Johnson opened his mouth to talk about pickaninnies and watermelons. David Cameron denied ever wearing a Hang Nelson Mandela t-shirt, but many of the Campus Tories did. Someone was certainly doing the fly-posting. I suppose they might have claimed that it was really a false flag operation by one of the lefty groups. The Socialist Workers denied having anything to do with the “Vote Thatcher to keep Kinnock out” leaflets that went out in their name.

I am quite sure that there are a small number of very clever Christians and a large number of very stupid ones who honestly and sincerely believe in Young Earth Creationism; who have honestly and sincerely built themselves a world in which Scripture Sola overrides the empirical world or who have just never considered the possibility that God didn’t create the universe in exactly six days in the late spring of 4004 BCE. And I am quite sure that many of them are beautiful lovely people, baking the chickens and feeding the bread and taking hot dinners to the needy or just working at the factory and having a few beers with their mates on a Saturday night and harming no-one. But I am equally sure that the prevalence of Young Earth Creationism—the use of “evolution” as an evangelical and Republican swearword—does not always represent any actual, deeply held belief. I don’t think that the person who fills my Facebook Feed with questions like “If Jesus isn’t the son of God, why are all the demons so scared of him?” thinks he is putting forward anything approaching an argument. Nor do I think that the equally infuriating atheists who endlessly talk about sky wizards have the slightest knowledge of or interest in the thing they think they are denouncing. I think that we are dealing with shibboleths.

Start out saying that God made the world in six days because it’s in the Bible. Proceed to saying that the world is flat because the round earth myth is believed by the same people who propagate the great evolution delusion. Assert that vaccines cause polio and covid was a scam because you are not prepared to take the knee to the new high priesthood of science. Connect that with the utterly discredited and debunked theory (which is only a theory) that if you went high enough you would reach something the liberals call “space” and that the moon exists and Americans walked on it. End up posting slogans saying “You can’t be a Christian and believe in the moon landings. Period.”

Either you are consciously twisting your mind into an absurdity: not just saying that 2+2 = 5 but believing it, so that reality melts away and there is no love but the love of Big Brother. Or else you are like the King who wears a green robe and insists that everyone praises it for its redness; and executes the first person who says that the green thing is green.

The world is flat. Science is a myth. Covid was a scam. If humans evolved from apes, how come there are still apes? Ukraine invaded itself. They aren’t beliefs. They are masonic handshakes. Anyone who hasn’t learned them is a radical Marxist lunatic.

Prevailing orthodoxies define an in-group, and an in-group is defined by the prevailing orthodoxies of its members. “Woke” beliefs are the beliefs of people designated “woke”; and “woke” people are the people with “woke” beliefs. And yes, equally, “fascist” beliefs are the beliefs of people we have already decided to call “fascists” on other grounds. Some of us on the Left may stay seated in the National Anthem or take the knee at football matches or pretend that we don’t know who King Charles is because of sincere and deeply held anti-monarchist convictions. But very many of us do so because it really pisses off the Tories. The overwhelming impetus behind the Brexit and MAGA cult is, in the jargon, to Own The Libs.

But these are not innocent toddlers who have not yet learned the social norms. We are not talking about an incredibly rich pop star who is trying to find out what he can get away with. We are not talking about children shouting words they don’t quite know the meaning of, or silly left wing students putting up posters of Mrs Thatcher’s head in a guillotine or silly right wing students threatening to go to Highgate and desecrate Karl Marx’s remains. We are not even talking about an all-licensed fool defecating on the stage because the snowflakes have banned humour. We are talking about a man who controls enough weapons to destroy the whole world. And another man who is rich enough to buy it. 

[1]  The Great Illuminatus Trilogy used to sit alongside the Great Dune Trilogy in Wood Green W.H Smiths. I suppose I should read it one day. I never could get my head around the card game. 

[2]  The 14 words are a pair of neo-Nazi slogans: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” and “because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth”.

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