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]

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America [9]

 What do we do now?

Well, we start organising and campaigning and winning arguments so that the next time there is an election, we do not lose.

But one of the things which has been lost is any real belief in the legitimacy of elections. It is an object of faith for the MAGA cult that the 2020 US election was “stolen” (and therefore January 6 was not an insurrection.) The British Right started to deny Kier Starmer’s legitimacy on the day he was elected. Real Americans support the Dark Lord; only Real Americans should be allowed to vote; so votes against the Dark Lord don’t count. The British version, that there has to be an election the minute the current incumbent performs badly in a straw poll, is scarcely any better. [1]

What has been lost is not one election. What has been lost is a way of looking at the world. Yes, it is possible that Kamala Harris could take back the White House in 2028. It is even possible, if the cult is serious about repealing the Twenty Second Amendment, that Barack Obama might come back for another go. It is just barely possible that Starmer can still defeat Farage in 2029, although I think it is overwhelmingly unlikely. But an administration which is Not Actively Fascist is no help if very-nearly-half-the-population are actively fascists. Or at least; fash-curious.

And that pre-supposes that there will be another election. It is, I grant, hard to imagine a scenario where the US President suspends democracy. I still believe in an America where, if that happened, some military officer—someone way to the right of me, probably, who doesn’t believe in evolution and thinks that American gals should stay at home all day and cook pancakes for their man and whops his kids when they are bad—marches into the Oval Office with a phaser and says “I am sorry, sir, but my oath is to the Constitution and as a matter of military honour and patriotism it is my duty to relieve you of command.” But then my America, the America of Steve Rogers and James T Kirk and Gary Cooper has never had much more to do with America America than the London of tap-dancing chimney sweeps, pearly kings and fog-enshrouded cottages has to do with Actual London.

In which case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Remind them if they’ve heard the tale and tell them if they’ve not, that once there was a spot… I am loyal to nothing, Colonel, except the Dream.

If the British Prime Minister abolished elections, I find it impossible to believe that the people or the press would put up with it. But it was impossible to imagine Boris Johnson as Prime Minister of the UK: I used to literally make jokes about it, in this forum. It was impossible to imagine a US President who seriously talked about annexing Canada and invading Greenland. That is literally the stuff of Simpson’s parody.

I think that Nigel Farage in Ten Downing Street is the least worst outcome we can realistically hope for. I think that there is a serious danger that Elon Musk will buy the 2029 election for Tommy Robinson or Lawrence Fox or even Andrew Tate. I was about to write a joke, along the lines of “That’s assuming that he hasn’t bought the whole country as part of a buy-one-get-one-free deal with Greenland” or “That’s assuming that we haven’t dissolved parliament and installed Charles as absolute monarch” or “That’s assuming that Europe hasn’t been annexed and turned into a beach resort” but I realise that there is no longer anything I can write which wouldn’t invite the response “Actually, that’s a very real possibility.”

Sometime in, I guess, 2027, Nigel Farage will cross the floor, join the Tory party, and wind up Reform. In 2028, he will challenge Badenoch (who was only ever a kamikaze lettuce) become leader of the opposition, and call a general election.

Every time someone says that there are no longer any ordinary decent Conservative MPs, an ordinary decent Tory MP drops dead. I think they do exist and I think that a remnant would cross the floor in the other direction and join the Labour Party. Starmer is—and I say this entirely without malice—the very personification of an ordinary decent Conservative. So what follows would be a straight electoral fight: on one side, a Reform/Conservative coalition, presumably called MUKGA. On the other side, the Rest of the World: Starmer’s Labour, all the Liberals, both the Greens, the Celtic Nationalists and Lord Buckethead. The charities and the churches and the arts would support the Not-Fascist-Alliance; most of the press would support the MUKGA. (The Guardian would urge readers to think very seriously and make their own decision.) Even with the Dark Lord’s apprentice bankrolling MUKGA, it ought to be no contest.

But there will be a contest, and the progressive alliance will lose. It will lose for the same reason Jeremy Corbyn lost. Progressives hate other Progressives much more than they hate Conservatives; but Conservatives hate Progressives much more than they hate other Conservatives. Last time it was the sensible moderate Centrists saying they couldn’t possibly support Corbyn; this time it will be the salt-of-the-earth old fashioned Leftists saying they couldn’t possibly support Starmer.

And let’s be clear: the Anti-MUKGA and the Never-Faragists will not have precisely the same views as me on Israel. They will have gone either a little bit too far or not quite far enough on gender. One of them will either be, or will not be, a vegan. One of them will believe in God; another one won’t. It will turn out that my candidate still owns a Neil Gaiman comic book or once laughed at Ricky Gervais. And with complete integrity I will say “I cannot possibly cast my vote for a party which doesn’t hate JK Rowling as much as JK Rowling ought to be hated.” And we will abstain, or found a breakaway Popular Front of Judea, and the Left will split, and the Right will win, and there will be torch-lit parades and book burnings and a life sized hologram of Dame Vera Lynne.

Are you prepared to say “You want Private Schools to retain their charitable status; I want Private Schools to be abolished altogether; but right here right now what matters is defeating fascism?”

Are you prepared to say “My deity of choice thinks that your entire lifestyle is sinful and would like you to be illegal—but right now, what matters is defeating fascism?”

Are you prepared to say “I think your deity of choice is a pernicious superstition and would like it to be banned—but right now what matters is defeating fascism?”

Obviously, you aren’t. No more am I. No more, on that particular issue we both agree is the most important issue, should we.

So let’s go break away and form a party that stands up for proper progressive values.

YODA VOICE: “That is why you fail.”

Wasn’t the Disruptor a 1970s Spider-Man bad-guy?

Not everyone who voted for the Dark Lord was actually a Sith. Quite a lot of people—including, astonishingly, some young people, some not-male people and some not-White People voted for him because they believed that he would shake things up.

Something must be done: this is something: therefore this should be done. True leadership involves not listening to anyone else and doing the first thing which comes into your head. Say what you like about Adolf, but he made the trains run on time. [2]

There are circumstances, for example, in a war or a football match, under which it is more important to have a guy at the front shouting “Make for those woods! NOW!” than to have a committee meeting and decide Sun Tzu would have actually made for the hills. Nelson said that no naval commander can go very far wrong provided he points his boats in the general direction of the enemy.

But have you noticed that only the Right get to be Disruptors, in the same way that only the Left get to be Virtue Signallers?

If you made me Prime Minister, I would impose a 100% tax on the profits of the Water Companies and prohibit the payment of bonuses to directors and dividends to shareholders unless and until they stop pumping human shit into the rivers. I would also calculate what it realistically costs to live a Decent Life [3], divide that figure by one thousand eight hundred and twenty, and make that the legal hourly minimum wage. Would I be called a Disruptor? Would people say that I wasn’t necessarily doing the right thing, but at least I was doing something? Or would they say that I was a lunatic, a communist, or unelectable and start planning a coup? And neither of those things are as obviously deranged as colonising Mars or invading Greenland.

And what if we win?

Would an incoming coalition of non-Fascists in 2028 or 2032 actually role back all the crazy stuff that the Dark Lord and his minions have enacted?

Or would they say “Well of course you can’t turn back the clock and you have to be realistic and the people have spoken. Being less racist was a fashionable idea in the 2020s, just like student grants were a fashionable idea in 1980s and taxing rich people was a fashionable idea in 1970s and not hanging people was a fashionable idea in the 1960s, but they wouldn’t work in the modern era because of chat-bots. Obviously the Dark Lord’s racist laws will have to stay in place for ever and ever and ever but we promise not to make them any worse.”

John Lennon said that Flower Power failed.

Steve Earl, on the other hand, said that songs helped to end the Vietnam War.

Certainly, Yoko’s theory that if everyone pulled their knickers down on an album cover, all warfare would cease proved to be a little ahead of its time. Although perhaps she would have cited GK Chesterton’s wry comment about Christianity: we will never know if it would have worked, because no one ever tried.

Nearly everyone now sees Viet Nam as having been a Bad Thing. Hippies and Leftists singing Give Peace a Chance in expensive hotel rooms contributed to that perception. Rowan Atkinson didn’t invent the idea that the First World War was an absurd and tragic disaster; neither did Joan Littlewood’s theatre workshop. But you can’t think about World War I without thinking of Oh What a Lovely War and Blackadder.

We still believe that the Second World War was our Finest Hour and the Spirit of the Blitz showed England At Her Best and that the War was very largely won by plucky English housewives with no help at all from the Americans or the Russians or that nice Mr Oppenheimer because that is the story we continue to tell ourselves.

The victory of the Right was achieved by an act of story telling. If I were Alan Moore or El Sandifer I might say that the victory of the Right was achieved by an act of magick, a summonsing. Certainly, it occurred at a conceptual level, in what Alan More would call idea space and what Neil Gaiman would call The Dreaming.

Their spell transformed “good manners”, “human empathy” and “not being a Nazi” into negative qualities. To say that a book “promoted good manners” was to say that it was a dangerous book; to say that a teacher had “human empathy” was to say that she was a bad teacher. Even those of us not subject to the spell still caught ourselves using formulations like “I know this implies that I have human empathy, but…” or “I don’t want to sound like someone with good manners, but…”

Alan Moore says that magick and storytelling is all about making connections between concepts; once you have cast the spell or told the story, the connection is real, even if it wasn’t before. The Right Wing spell drew a line between good manners, human empathy and not being a Nazi and a plot by Jewish-Satanist-Communist-Alien-Lizard-People to destroy the world. So that to have empathy or good manners or not be a Nazi marked you out as a traitor and a quizzling. Manners, empathy and anti-Nazism turned out to be the exact things that we have only ten years to save the West from.

The Dark Lord’s Apprentice believes that there is something called the “Human Empathy Mind Virus” which colonises people’s brains and will prevent him sending a space ship to Mars.

And we sat back and let it happen.

Maybe the geologists really did start using “Before Present” instead of “Before Jesus” in dates because they wanted to show good manners to people who were not Christians, and maybe there was a Good Manners Brigade egging them on. Maybe when Birmingham City council abolished Christmas it was an example of Good Manners Gone mad. [4] Maybe it was indeed human empathy that caused the National Trust to start making scones with margarine instead of butter; and maybe there was a Human Empathy Mob putting them under pressure to do so, and maybe that is a reason to boycott all their stately homes and castles in perpetuity. Maybe every time a non-White non-male writer wins a science fiction award it really is the result of an orchestrated campaign by the Not Nazi Warriors.

Anyone might think that people who won’t eat dead animals are a bit silly and a bit faddish and a bit holier than thou. I am certainly not going to stop eating sausages, although I might cut down on the red meat and try to buy from free-range farmers. But the Right’s conceptual magic means that the person who orders soya milk is threatening the person who prefers the old fashioned kind squeezed out of cows; and the bakery that sells sausage rolls made with lentils is threatening the freedom of those of us who prefer emulsified high fat offal tubes. [5] And the lentil eaters and the oak milk drinkers have Too Much Empathy, and are therefore in league with the communist Jewish alien Satanists, and the next government is going to declare war on them.

When the Far Right attempted a pogrom against Muslims in the UK, we didn’t see a people’s militia rising up to defend them. It was mostly the police, and Two-Tier Kier who did that. But quite a lot of people volunteered to help clear up the mess the next morning.

Not everyone my age is a fascist, but most of the fascists are people of my age. Most young people are very firmly, even aggressively, in the Not A Fascist camp. The Millennials I interact with seem uniformly nice and in some cases have educated me about inclusivity. But then, Andrew Tate reading Tommy Robinson agreeing Mosque burning girlfriend murdering twenty somethings probably don’t come into libraries or sing sea shanties. It is certainly young people who are taking down statues of human traffickers and throwing soup at oil paintings and sensible middle-aged centrist politicians who are telling them that they mustn’t.

I think that there is some chance that when a future Faragist or Robinsonian regime starts making egregiously fascistic laws, some young people would simply stick their heels in the ground and say “no”.

I think that there is a chance that if someone made a law that said people are not allowed to refer to other people by the other people’s preferred pronouns; or that teachers were not allowed to talk about the slave trade or the Bristol bus boycott; or that books displaying too much empathy had to be removed from public libraries, then these laws would simply be disregarded.

I am not envisaging a full-on counter-coup. Ten thousand people saying “No, we aren’t going to do that” might do the trick very nicely?

How far would it go? Would a British youth uprising lead to a British Tianamen square, with English bobbies riding their bicycles over the protesters bodies? I think there is some hope that even a MUKGA government would retain some sense of good old fashioned British fair play and decency, and use sarcasm rather than violence to put down the insurrection. But maybe by then we’ll be a vassal state of the American Empire and all the policemen will have guns.

If it comes to it, then of course I would hide my trans and gay friends in the annex and lie to the gestapo about their whereabouts. And I do wonder how long it will be before civilised countries have to start offering asylum to American trans people and American gay people and American women with unwanted pregnancies and American academics with unwanted opinions.

But I think that we will mainly have to launch our counter-attack in Idea Space.

“Are you talking about Cultural Marxism, Andrew?”

No, not Cultural Marxism. But maybe some kind of Organised Cultural Niceness?

[1]  King Charles no more has the power to dissolve parliament than the Queen of the May has the power to levy taxation. 

[2]  He did not in fact make the trains run on time.

[3]  Rent or mortgage on modest two-bedroom house; three meals a day; replacing shoes and clothes a couple of times a year; cost of medicine, dentistry and glasses; running costs of a small car and/or bus and train fairs as appropriate; a little bit left over for nice things

[4]  Birmingham council did not in fact abolish Christmas.

[5]  It is the same logic that says that if two gay people get married, all the straight people somehow become less married.

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