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. 

America [10]

What am I going to do?

There is Inflation and Unemployment; and there is noticing that the price of eggs has gone up and hearing that your Uncle Albert has been laid off. There is reading about war and walking down the street and seeing piles of rubble which used to be your neighbour’s houses. There is reading about the Pandemic and discovering that the streets are empty, everyone is wearing masks, and you have a tickling at the back of your throat.

I was at a folk gig, of course, listening to the wonderful Chris Wood in the lovely Wardrobe venue. There were only half a dozen people there; and the manager was explaining, ruefully, that the venue was going to have to close, and the singer was saying that he was well-known enough to weather the storm, but some younger singers might not be. That was the point at which I realised that Covid was a real thing, not just something that you read about in the papers.

There was enough warning that I could do a little bit of preparation. Make sure that I had some masks and some testing kits, and go to Asda and buy too much pasta and too many cans of tuna and too much toilet paper in case there was a shortage [1]

We had an English teacher who told us more or less in so many words that we didn’t need to worry too much about our exams, because almost certainly there would be nuclear war before the 1980s were out. I think he talked about constructing a bomb shelter in his garden. But there was an assumption, I think, that if there were a nuclear war, someone would be in charge: there would be police to set up standpipes in the street and vans bringing supplies and Captain Mainwaring to tell us to make sure our windows were blacked out. And there are the Preppers, obviously, the survivalists, with cellars full of condensed milk and baked beans and assault rifles. But for them it is a hobby, a fantasy, like dressing up as a wizard and thumping your friends with rubber swords.

There are a lot of lunatics in the world at present, and several of them have nuclear arsenals. I don’t think there is much danger of a Threads-style holocaust with everyone firing all their missiles at everybody else and a few survivors eating cockroaches in the ruins of Lords Cricket Ground. There is some chance of a small mushroom cloud in Chernivtsi or Rafah. There will be pictures of Ukrainains or Palestinians being reduced to Hiroshima shadows, candle-lit vigils outside churches and letters to the Times deploring it in the strongest possible terms. But I don’t think that buying a sixteen pack of bog-roll will have much effect one way or the other.

ALEC GUINESS VOICE: “That’s your uncle talking.”

When I was twelve, if I could have had one single wish, it would have been to read every Marvel Comic book, including the ones that came out before I was born; and also to watch every episodes of Doctor Who, including the black and white ones, from the beginning, and to watch Star Wars every day if I wanted to. I didn’t envisage magic or time travel: a readers pass to the BBC archives and the Marvel vault would have done the trick. [2]

When I was a little older, I would have added “To go to see a Shakespeare play or a Wagner opera every night” to my list.

Twice a week someone writes an article about what the Internet has taken away from us, and how wonderful it would be if we didn’t have mobile phones. “Oh, the wifi went down one night and there was beautiful silence and conversation and we all started to play charades, darling!”

“Why don’t you play charades when the wifi is not down?”

Because we don’t want to. [3]

I find the people who pull out their phones the moment there is a lull in the conversation incredibly irritating. I get so annoyed that I pull out my phone and post something amusing about them on Twitter. I am distracted by the people who text in cinemas or at gigs: not by the light or the noise, particularly. I am distracted by the mere fact of other people being distracted even if they are not distracting me. [4]

But people who get out their phones during the good bit of a film, or when I am coming to the punchline of a joke they have only heard three or four times before are the same people who used to pull paperback books out of their pockets on movie night; whose face was always obscured by the Times or the Daily Mirror; who wouldn’t make eye-contact with me at breakfast because they were more interested in the ingredients on the orange juice carton. And there were kids who used to get hit with the big stick for fidgeting and not paying attention at school; and ladies who wouldn’t go anywhere, including theatres and prayer meetings, without their knitting, and men who knew very well that smoking was incredibly bad for them but needed something to do with their hands.

And people have always liked pictures of ladies with no clothes on and cute kittens: what do you think tabloid newspapers were for? [5]

Phones don’t irritate people; people irritate people.

I can remember the days when everyone had to carry a little book around with them wherever they went. And when they wanted to pay for something costing more than a few pounds, they would take the note book out, write in it, tear a page out, hand it to the cashier, who would write a number on the back of it, and put it in the till.

I recall a columnist in the Daily Mail saying that if we valued civilization we had at all costs to preserve these “cheque-books”. Writing a cheque created a little pause for breath in the hustle and bustle of daily life. It meant that the person you bought your wine from saw your handwriting. It meant that the cultured could show off their smart leather “cheque-book-holder” and their smart silver “fountain-pen”. And it discouraged impulse spending by reminding you of what things cost.

None of which is untrue. But once the technology existed, we all started using plastic debit cards instead, because they were more convenient. Shout “cash is king” until the cows come home, but I haven’t seen a £5 note since before Christmas.

Douglas Adams said that when a new media is invented, people cling to accidental features of the obsolete media: people like to have articles that they are never going to read; people like the smell of books.

I like to write; and I like to read; and I like to think. I am very much aware that if I got a phone call from the Guardian tomorrow asking me to write five hundred words on what a Star Wars enthusiast thinks about Donald Trump I would spend 48 hours failing to start it; stay up until 6AM and send it off three minutes before the deadline, having failed to say what I wanted to say, and only noticing after publication that I had written “I do think Donald Trump is a nice man” instead of “I do not think Donald Trump is a nice man.” And I’ve never had the confidence to write pitches or go for auditions. Heck, if someone says “Well, it’s quite good, but we don’t like the middle paragraph” I would probably crawl into a small dark room and not come out for a fortnight. [6]  

So fanzines and self-publication have always been a precise fit to who I want to be. Cut out the middle-man, get your words down and put them in the hands of a reader. Rattling off documents on a word processor and photocopying them and selling them to anyone who will read them for 50p or a free beer.

So the Internet was a gift to me. I could throw my words into space and see if anyone caught them, without any nasty editor or vulgar paycheck to get in the way. I hate to think how much time I spent writing commentary and throwing it into UseNet in the olden days. (Who remembers Drax? Pierre Savois? The Rev’d Steve Winter?)

On the other hand, the existence of a disposable media of this kind creates fluency, hitches your typing fingers to your interior monologue, gives you permission to write the worst first draft in human history: I wouldn’t be doing this today if rec.arts.drwho had never existed.

Usenet was my Hamburg and my Cavern. Twitter was fun until it wasn’t. Threads was like Twitter used to be for about six months and then became like Twitter is now.

For a disturbing number of years, I have published my writing on Blogger. I have promoted my writing on Twitter and Facebook. I have made a pitifully small amount of money from Lulu, and a quite decent side income from Patreon. I have read comics and books on Kindle and the Marvel App. My Work In Progress could never have happened without the Internet Archive.

What will I do if the whole of the Internet becomes indistinguishable from Twitter?

If any of my friends read this, I know well enough what they would say. [7]  They would say “Well, if it annoys you so much Andrew, there is a very simple solution: just stop reading social media.”

They have a point. If Facebook is a racist sewer I don’t have to stick my nose in it. Some people announced rather forcibly that they were flouncing off Twitter and deleting their Twitter accounts when the Dark Lord’s Apprentice bought it for the price of a large glacial island in the North Atlantic. I have simply found that the Twitter which actually used to be quite good fun has simply gone away and is never coming back. But for, eegad, twenty years, and much more if you go back to Usenet, Soshal Meejah has been what I use to get my stuff out there. Would you be reading this now if you hadn’t found me on Google, or Facebook, or Twitter?

But if Google and Facebook and Twitter join the Muskocracy, in what way does Online Andrew, the real Andrew, me, continue to even exist? 

[1]  There was a shortage, but only because everybody else was stocking up as well.

[2]  What I remember most about the legendary Longleat Twentieth Anniversary festival is squeezing into a tent and watching old stories that I had read about but never dated to hope I would see. I think that is still the only time I have watched Dalek Invasion of Earth right the way through.


[3] Why did folk music come to an end? Because the “folk” were offered a choice, and chose the Music Hall and the gramophone instead.


[4] There is probably a three letter abbreviation for that condition.


[5] I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wicked about photos of cute kittens, provided the kitten has given informed consent.


[6]  There is probably a three letter abbreviation for that condition as well.


[7]  None of my friends will in fact read this. My friends will say “Why would we read you going on and on about your pet subjects when we can hear you doing it in the pub.” In fact, the Andrew who types and the Andrew who speaks are two quite different Andrews; and the one who exists in Cyberspace is the authentic one.

[To be concluded]

Supporters of my Patreon have already read all ten ELEVEN ACTUALLY parts of this long form essay.

Why not join them?