9: It is entirely possible to think that the Atlantic Slave Trade is quite a serious stain on Britain’s national history; and to simultaneously believe that street furniture should not be summarily removed as part of a popular demonstration.

It is entirely possible to think that the Atlantic Slave Trade is quite a serious stain on Britain’s national history; and to simultaneously believe that street furniture should not be summarily removed as part of a popular demonstration.

It is entirely possible to think that covering your mouth with gauze during a ‘flu epidemic is a sensible precaution, and to simultaneously think that governments have got no right to make laws telling people what to do with their faces.

It is equally possible to think that the medical evidence that masks inhibited the spread of Covid was pretty shaky and to simultaneously think that the government was doing the best it could under very difficult circumstances and we should all have stuck to the rules, even Boris Johnson.

It is entirely possible to think that it would be a good idea for the British Labour Party to have adopted a socialist programme, but to simultaneously believe that Mr Jeremy Corbyn campaigned inadequately during the European referendum and said some very ill-considered things about Jewish people.

It is equally possible to think that Jeremy Corbyn was a man of integrity and honesty, that the Jew thing was obvious bollocks from start to finish and to simultaneously think that Momentum’s socialist manifesto would have been a disaster in twenty first century Britain.

There are two sides two every argument, apart from the one about who created the Silver Surfer.

But a substantial minority of the human race believes that Covid Masks were part of a global conspiracy. A substantial minority of the human race believes that Jews (or space aliens, or Democrats, or the globalists, but when you scratch it, it usually comes down to the Jews) wanted me to wear a breath mask in order to acclimatise me to doing exactly what the government tells me. And to symbolise the fact that I have no right to free speech. And to show that white people are the real slaves and Black people are the real masters.

Or that someone in a high place just invented a pointless and irksome rule because he gets off on making pointless and irksome rules.

And a much larger group of people, people who don’t consciously subscribe to conspiracy theories, have picked up a general vibe that wearing masks is liberal, or left wing, or, as it is generally framed nowadays, woke. And that refusing to wear masks is the proper freedom loving commie hating stand up to authority back to blighty common sense spirit of the Blitz thing to do.

And I know that they think that.

And they know that I know.

And Sir Kier Starmer knows that I know that they know that I know.

So when I mask-up, I am not simply obeying perfectly sensible public health advice. I am also sticking it, very firmly, up the un-vaccinated bottoms of right wing conspiracy theorists.

And when you don’t mask up, you are not simply ignoring public health advice that you think is a bit silly. You are also refusing to take the knee to the liberal woke politically correct elites.

When the next pandemic comes—probably in time for Christmas—the government of the day will not make its choices based on finely balanced scientific advise. Not only. They will be consciously aware that masks are “a bit left wing” and not wearing masks is “a bit right wing”. And that will influence their decision.

They might say “We don’t care about the symbolism; we’ll just follow the science.” That would be the sensible thing to say. But “not following the symbolism and just following the science” itself has a symbolic value. To some people, the whole idea of being sensible is ‘a bit left wing’.

This is not a new situation. We are human beings; we have consciousness and language and we make up stories; we inhabit a universe of symbols as well as a universe of objects. Crosses and masks and shamrocks and poppies and lions and vegan sausages have powerful symbolic meanings about which people are prepared to go to war and write jolly stiff letters to the Daily Telegraph.

But we increasingly inhabit a symbolic universe which consists, not of complex texts to be interpreted by priests and shaman; but as collections of singular, irreducible nuggets of meaning.

I get that fuck and nigger and gollywogs and men’s dicks and Harry Potter are dirty or racist or pornographic or transphobic regardless of context. But we increasingly aspire to a conceptual universe where everything has context-free meaning.

There is no neutral space.

There are no actions which are not symbolic.

There are no thoughts outside of language.

Whoever is not with us is against us.

If you aren’t actively punching Nazis then you are sticking it to the Libtards.

Or very possibly vice versa.

Some time ago I wrote a short book, which I entitled One Hundred And Forty Characters In Search of an Argument.

It would now have to be titled “Two hundred and eighty characters in search of an argument or four thousand if you have a blue tick.”

I argued that the site formally known as Twitter tends to turn all debate into a game of “What side are you on?” It doesn’t really matter whether arguments are wrong or right, correct or incorrect, sensible or stupid. Arguments function only as bugle calls, as badges of identity, as signifiers of tribal orientation.

I reject your argument, not because it is illogical or factually incorrect, nor even because it is based on a false ideology. Rightness and wrongness are not qualities that arguments have. I reject your argument because it is the kind of thing that the kind of person who believes the kind of thing you believe might be expected to believe.

I happen to think that it would be a good idea for the UK to maintain free trade with the continent we are geographically part of. But there are good arguments against this.

I happen to think that it was quite a good idea for a female person to essay the role of Doctor Who. But there are good arguments against this.

I think that the rich should be slightly poorer and the poor should be slightly richer. But there are good arguments against this.

I think that women should have the final say about abortion. I don’t think that even nurses who murder babies should be hanged. I don’t think teachers should be allowed to beat students with sticks. Or indeed with anything else. I think that we need to radically reduce the amount of fossil fuel we burn. I think that Jack Kirby created the Silver Surfer. But there are good arguments against all these points. Except the last one.

But even quite serious politicians are increasingly reluctant to tell me what the good arguments are. They would rather tell me that the kinds of people who agree with me are lefties or remoaners or corbynites or wokies.

Since I wrote that book, the argument about identity and privilege has moved on. 

Or very possibly it has stayed in exactly the same place and I have caught up with it.

I now understand that European and American society is built primarily on white supremacy, and secondarily on patriarchy and also on a “Christian” hegemony. “The Left” now broadly means those who think that this is a bad thing and should be dismantled. “The Right” now broadly means those who benefit from the present state of affairs and want to maintain it. This is essentially the only political dividing line which matters. Every opinion, every action, every episode of Doctor Who and every flavour of Walkers Crisps is to be understood according to where it fits into that power struggle.

White supremacy does not mean “white people are in charge of every single interaction and every single organisation.” It doesn’t mean “people in military uniforms or with bedsheets over their heads burning crosses”. It means something more like “treating whiteness as the default state”; assuming that everything is or should be white unless it has a very good excuse not to be.

When I studied A level English literature in school every single book I studied was written by a white author. Every single character we studied was a white character. Except one. And he strangled his wife.

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8: There is going to be a new Harry Potter television series.

There is going to be a new Harry Potter television series.

It doesn’t seem especially surprising that the same book should be adapted twice in twenty years, and it doesn’t seem surprising that a book published at the turn of the millennium is still widely read. Kids are still reading the Famous Five after eighty years, and Alice in Wonderland after an hundred and eighty.

I agree with Ursula Le Guin that the Potter books are a collection of not-very-original fantasy tropes spun around a not-very-interesting boarding school story; and I share her irritation that a lot of people who are not-very-interested in fantasy hailed them as the last word in originality. But it is also true that the earlier volumes, at least, were jolly good fun. I remember my mother, who wouldn’t have recognised a fantasy trope if you dropped one on her head, laughing out loud at the “First Years are not allowed their own broomstick” letter when it was reproduced in a feature in the Guardian Saturday supplement.

What kind of fantasy story do you like?

Do you prefer one where magic is magical—a strange, spiritual, numinous, force? Do you like stories like Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, with its True Names and Shadows and its Taoist, Jungian underpinning? Stories which drop you without explanation into universes which operate according to their own rules and leave you to figure out what the hell is going on? Phillip Pullman may have turned into a colossal bore, but there’s a real genius to the way he takes Daemons and Dust and The Authority for granted from page one.

Or do you prefer worlds where magic and wizards are utterly normal and not very mysterious at all; where encountering a unicorn is a bit like spotting a rare breed of gazelle? There have been half a dozen TV shows in which witches, ghosts, djinn, vampires and robots are presented as a normal part of suburban life, with hilarious consequences. A kid getting detention for not doing his potions homework is fun in exactly the same way that a cowboy saloon where the cowboys are aliens and the Indians are robots is fun.

The Potter books aren’t exactly spoofs, but they are closer in spirit to Terry Pratchett than they are to George R Martin. Pratchett had done the “Tom Browns Schooldays Only Magic” schtick eight years before Rowling.

It is always a bit annoying when something is over-praised. My bugbear used to be people who had never read any comic apart from Sandman telling me that Sandman was the only comic there had ever been in the history of comics that was worth reading. Some of them wrote introductions to the collected editions. The aforementioned mother used to get similarly miffed when people who had once heard a recording of Pavarotti at a football match claimed to be devotees of the opera. But it’s not a good look. Those of us who liked fantasy before it was cool should probably resist the temptation to tell the millennials that they are not allowed to like Hogwarts because Silmarillion.

Any interest I have in the Expanded Potterverse will be purely exegetical. Rowling is good at world-building; mediocre at plots; and very, very bad at writing. The existing films gave us the bare bones of her stories, but only the slightest hint of the lore. A TV show, with twelve or sixteen hours to spend on each volume, would give the whacky Hogwartian detail space to breathe; the contrived soapy plots time to unfurl, but would free us from the odious necessity of reading JKR’s prose. It may well be that the earlier, shorter volumes will have to be padded out, but JKR is by all accounts still alive and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, so she will presumably be available to pump more background detail into the setting.

The branding seems weird. It appears that the TV show will emulate the look and feel of the movies (which are, we are told, the “core of the franchise”): it will not “re-imagine” the books. The current party line is that the movies transmute the pictures in JKRs head directly onto the screen, and therefore any attempt to visualise the setting differently would simply be incorrect. So we are going to end up with two equally authoritative adaptations of the same text, and, presumably, decades of argument about Canon.

We live in a world where there are more interesting TV shows than anyone can reasonably be expected to watch. But I might well give the series a look. It can’t possibly be as boring as the BBC’s adaptation of His Dank Materials.

I’d even by a ticket for The Cursed Child if it toured the regions.

But notice what is happening at this very moment.

The second I mentioned Harry Potter, my readership split into two factions.

Which side are you on?

Are you on the side which is thinking “Why is he even talking about this TV series? Why is he even contemplating watching it? Why is he even referring to it as Harry Potter? The correct terminology is ‘Those Shitty Wizard Books’”

Or are you on the side of the line which is already bulverising (q.v) my opinion? “Andrew only thinks that JKR is a bad writer because he doesn’t like her politics. He only thinks that her plots are derivative because she has been demonised by a hard-line trans cult. He only thinks her fantasy is unimaginative because he is part of a conspiracy to abolish lesbians. He only thinks her prose is poor because he can’t define the term woman correctly.”

As a matter of fact, Andrew does think that JKR’s public pronouncements on gender exhibit a vindictive wrong-headedness which borders on monomania. But he has had considerable practice in enjoying problematic texts. He thinks that you can believe that JKR is wrong about public lavatories and simultaneously be quite interested in what Netflix does with the new Harry Potter TV show.

But he is quite aware that in this respect he is in the minority. For very many people, Those Shitty Wizard Books have the same status as rag dolls which are not penguins, marble carvings of men’s front bottoms, and posters with the word FUCK on them.

Irreducible signifiers of wrongness.

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7: I have told the story before about attending a workshop organised by a local Black writers’ collective.

 I have told the story before about attending a workshop organised by a local Black writers’ collective.

I heard a number of poems and short stories about being Black, being proud of being Black, enjoying being Black, and seeing Blackness as a positive thing; and wondering how poetry written in that style but from my own—white—point of view might sound.

I couldn’t imagine any way of writing about being white, or being proud of being white which didn’t come out sounding like Enoch Powell and Billy Brit.

All this was a long time ago, I remember, before the Right had weaponised the term woke. I understood Black and white to be neutral, descriptive terms, like fair-haired and dark-haired.. I thought that racism meant “disliking people who had dark skin”: very silly, and unpleasant, but no different in principle from disliking fat people or people with freckles. I even thought that the bad word, the word beginning with a different letter from FUCK, was a term of abuse, like Froggie or Jock or Taffy or Limey or Aussie. It certainly could be very hurtful indeed, but it might also be neutral or funny or even affectionate, depending on who said it to whom in which context and on what day of the week. Racists were horrible people, and everything could be solved if everyone was a bit nicer. Ebony and ivory lived together in perfect harmony on Paul McCartney’s keyboard.

I have also told the story of an unfortunate fancy dress costume I once wore (more than thirty years ago) which at the time I sincerely felt was harmless because I didn’t mean anything by it.

I have also told the story about how, subsequently, I discovered Martin Carthy and the Incredible String Band and especially Show of Hands, and came to believe that they offered a positive, non-offensive way of celebrating my own, white, identity. The England of English folk music, and especially of the 1960s folk revival, is certainly an imaginary England, but then the Africa of the Black diaspora is to some extent an imaginary Africa. Salman Rushdie wrote a very good book about India called Imaginary Homelands.

A fortnight after I had embraced English folk music as a possible identity, Nick Griffin appropriated it for his white supremacist British National Party, and the whole folk-against-fascism thing happened. Say what you like about Nigel Farage, he has never shown much interest in Morris Dancing.

Me and Nick Griffin were, unfortunately, both particularly fond of one particular Show of Hands track. I discussed the song at some length in this forum at that time. I thought the song was lamenting the fact that there is a living folk-tradition among some Black and Irish communities, whereas white British people tend to take the piss out of singers who say hey-nonny-no with their fingers in their ears. But some people thought that it was playing on unfortunate tropes about vibrancy and an in-built senses of rhythm. Steve Knightley himself (who wrote the song) said that it was really about the 2001 performing arts act, which would have put small folk venues out of business. The philistine arts minister Kim Howells is certainly referenced in the lyrics.

One contributor to the discussion asserted that the song, the singer and the band were irreducibly racist (“why are we even talking about this?”) while generously conceding that I was allowed to like “problematic” things. Another went as far as to say that the entire conversation was racist: here was a privileged person—a straight white male with a job in the music industry and a platform—implying that he had something to complain about, and here was I, another middle class white person, calmly discussing whether or not he had a point.

In another song by the same band a white person—a white person!—complains that he is out of work and can’t afford to live in his own village because second-home owners have priced locals out. First world, as the young people say, problem.

In the course of the discussion, I blurted out: “You are saying that all white people are racist; or, at any rate, you are defining racist as ‘what white people are’”.

To cut to the chase.

I have since come around to the position that all white people are, in fact, racist, and that “what white people are” is a pretty good definition of the word.

But of course, speaking as a woke post-modernist who has read a little Foucault, I would have to add “It all depends on what you mean by racist.” Because words mean whatever I want them to mean.

I still think Roots is an excellent song.

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6: Socratic Dialogue

 “Andrew—why have you put that toy on display in your front room?

“Because I was fond of it for the first dozen years of my life; and because, in a weird way, I still think of it as a friend, or at least the mortal remains of a friend, and I cannot quite bring myself to destroy it. It’s silly, I know, but I am a little sentimental about these things.”

“Yes; but surely you can see that as a Jewish person, the whole idea of a rag-doll with a cute felt skull-cap and a cute hook nose and little pigtails plaited out of black wool, and a cute little bag containing thirty tiny little coins—can’t you see that is insulting and upsetting to me?”

If you want Andrew to reply:

“I am sorry; the dolls were so common in my childhood that it had never occurred to me that it was connected with hurtful stereotypes, but now you have pointed them out, naturally I will not display it any more”

select Option 1.

If you want Andrew to reply:

“I think you are being hypersensitive; I think the doll is harmless and I didn’t mean anything by it. But given your heritage and your history, you have a perfect right to be hypersensitive, and out of basic human decency I will take the toy down.”

select Option 2.

If you want Andrew to reply:

“Yes, I acknowledge that, in origin if not in intention, the toy is a racist caricature. But in return, will you acknowledge that Sid The Yid was my imaginary friend when I was a child; and that my right to display symbols of my childhood trump your right not to see caricatures of your racial and religious identity?”

select Option 3.

If you want Andrew to reply:

“The figure is not remotely racist; only someone engaged in manufactured grievance could possibly find it so. It’s a stretch to see the thirty silver coins as being somehow connected with Judas; and anyway, in my childhood games, Sid the Yid used to share them with Horace the Heaffalump”

select Option 4.

If you want Andrew to reply:

“But I didn’t hate Sid the Yid: the whole reason for wanting to display him is that I loved him. You can’t call me antisemitic. Some of my favourite toys are Jewish.”

select Option 5.

If you want Andrew to reply

“You can’t imagine that I was anti-semitic when I was young enough to be playing with stuffed toys. Stop imposing adult political sensibilities on kids.”

select Option 6.

If you want Andrew to reply:

“The term Yid isn’t remotely racist. It’s an acronym for Youthful Incomer from the Diaspora.”

select Option 7.

If you think that Andrew is making heavy weather of a very obvious point, 

select Option 8.

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5: Once upon a time, Andrew was walking down the road.

Once upon a time, Andrew was walking down the road.

Outside a shop, he saw a poster with the words FUCK OFF! printed on it in large, unfriendly letters.

Immediately, he performed an exegesis.

“I think it means ‘We are closed today’”, he said. “But I wonder why they have expressed it in such a rude way? Perhaps the owner was genuinely cross when he stuck it up. Or perhaps he has such a reputation for good manners in the neighbourhood that he takes it for granted that everyone will take FUCK OFF! as a good natured joke.”

He thought a bit longer.

“Perhaps it is a message delivered to a particular customer,” he thought “One who was very rude to him yesterday, and who will know the message is directed at him.”

“Perhaps that’s his standard OPEN / SHUT notice” he thought “Maybe it says COME IN YOU WANKER on the other side. Maybe he’s making the point that he’s the kind of chap who doesn’t care about social norms and wants to attract customers who feel the same way?”

“Or maybe he’s from a different culture” he thought “Where FUCK isn’t nearly such a rude word. I remember once eating in a cafe in Germany with a waitress who kept dropping ‘fucks’ and ‘bullshits’ into the conversation—I can only suppose she was translating milder German words and didn’t know how rude she was being in English. Or perhaps she had heard that the English were exceptionally foul-mouthed. There is a funny story about how an England cricket manager in the 1950s complained to the Australian cricket manager that members of his team kept using obscene and shocking language. The Aussie turned to his players and said ‘All right—which of you bastards has been calling this bastard a bastard?’”

“No, I’m overthinking this” he concluded. “It’s much more likely to be an advert for a local punk gig, or a political advert from a local anarchist collective.”

And then Andrew had a brain wave. He decided to ask the shopkeeper what the poster meant.

“Excuse me” he said “Why have you stuck such a rude poster on your door?”

“I am sure I don’t know what you mean,” said the shopkeeper. “There is absolutely nothing rude about the word FUCK. It’s just an acronym for Fornication Under Consent of The King. I intended it to mean ‘Please be advised that I am not taking visitors today’ and if you found it offensive, that is your problem; it is rude only in your head. Now be a good wanker and bugger off.”

As a matter of fact, the word FUCK is not, in itself, particularly rude.

It kind of represents rudeness: everyone knows that it is the King of Swears, the one word you must never, ever say: but in fact nearly everyone uses it all the time. In a conversational context “Fuck off...!” very often means “That is very surprising and I can hardly believe it.” I myself occasionally use it to mean “I acknowledge that you have told a joke at my expense, and, while at one level being a little bit annoyed, at another level, I acknowledge that it was a little bit funny.”

There is an old saying that expletives are okay when used as exclamation marks, but not when used as commas. For some fucking people, they are the actual fucking font.

I believe that the law currently takes the view that the true meaning of a text resides in the intention of the author.

If I intended my pirate cartoon strip to produce sexual excitement, then it counts as pornography (even if no-one is particularly turned on by it) but if I honestly didn’t mean it to be sexy, then it isn’t porn even if loads of people get off on looking at it. A person skinny dipping on a public beach might be charged with public order offences or causing a disturbance, but he isn’t committing a sexual offence unless you can prove that he took his clothes off for specifically kinky reasons.

This is quite sensible. But there is a problem with it.

I know that some people find bodies sexy. Not my body, necessarily, but bodies in general. I know that some people are embarrassed by them. It may be that in your nudist colony, no-one pays the slightest attention to anyone else’s skin; and it may be that that is a more sensible way of going about things, but when I decided to walk round Sainsbury’s in my birthday suit, I knew that I was doing something that other people would find (at the very least) odd. I can’t not have known.

The shop keeper knew that some people consider FUCK to be a very rude word when he stuck up the poster. He can’t possibly not have known. You can’t isolate the meaning of the word from the act of putting the poster up. The true meaning of the poster is “I am the sort of person who would display this sort of poster in my shop window.”

We aren’t really talking about the F-word. We are talking about a different word. Which begins with a different letter of the alphabet. Which is even ruder and more shocking. And which brings us back to penguins. 

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