Practice

I've just spent a very distracting few minutes on the tube watching someone play a game where two pill things race along two pairs of parallel tracks avoiding squares and collecting circles. As I haven't played a computer game for a number of years, this strikes me a startlingly basic. However, I do understand its place in a very popular new genre of mobile games; I also understand the promoted attraction of such games. You see people playing them all the time on public transport: barely branded minichrome* games that are supposedly designed to train your brain. In the case of the example I just witnessed, the key skill appears to be a kind of high speed multitasking, because you have to guide the two little pill things simultaneously. I have no doubt whatsoever that the game in question was very good at improving one's ability to guide two fast moving sprites (now there's a word you don't hear any more**) simultaneously along two tracks of obstacles/rewards, but I am not sure when this particular skill will come in handy in the real world. I'm not sure anyone will ever need to drive two cars simultaneously. I don't know, maybe it helps with piano playing. 

Generally with these 'brain training' games I struggle understand the higher purpose of what they're training your brain to do. Hand-eye coordination is a skill that is often supposed to be improved by such games, but how much hand-eye coordinaton do we need beyond the not dropping things on the floor by missing the table or stabbing ourselves in the eye with a spoon that most of us learn by the age of three? Surely high functioning hand-eye coordinaton is useful for one thing: playing more computer games. 

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, people are only too willing to spend time and money on any old crap if they are told that it is good for them: look at the amount of nutritionally redundant chia seed that is now flogged to the 'health' food obsessed. Sure if you think it tastes nice, then buy it, but if you're buying it because you think it's good for you, I strongly encourage you to find any scientific evidence that it is in any way beneficial for you. There is plenty of evidence that chia seeds contain all sorts of nutrients and proteins, but there is none that shows that humans can ingest any of them. Equally with computer games: by all means play computer games, just don't pretend they turning you into some sort of superhuman. They are not, if you're lucky they're turning you into someone who is better at computer games. 

*i.e. of limited palette 

**it's possible that you never heard/read it if you weren't into computer games in the 80s 

Phar distant past

Whilst trading insults about each other's mother in the outro of their 1992 masterpiece 'Ya Mamma', one of the Pharcyde eventually cracks and blurts out "you're a sellout," to which of course the response is "your mamma's a sellout." These days, this strikes me as wonderfully evocative of its time: the idea that being a sellout could be an insult now seems endearingly archaic. Indeed pretty much everything about the Pharcyde's debut album 'Bizzare Ride II' seems to speak of an entirely different world: one where a hip-hop album could be about more than how much money and women one has, or how much everyone should be waving their hands/drinks/bottoms in the air. 

I've talked about the lack of disconnected subcultures before and hip-hop is an entire genre that has moved from a subculture to become a dominant part of the mainstream. In the process it has become a business more than a culture. Hip-hop (in its broadest sense) is still one of the most creative forces in popular culture, but one of its core traditional narratives - with rap as a means of wealth creation to pull the performer out of poverty - has become distorted and the means have become confused with the ends. Hip-hop is almost entirely about money these days and has been for many years, as DJ Shadow observed in 'Why Hop-hop sucks in 96'. I don't think this is exclusive to hip-hop: the single minded banality equating conspicuous consumption with achievement is ubiquitous across mainstream culture and thought. It goes hand in hand with the total commodification of subculture. 

I have reached an age where my youth is being re-appropriated by the young; there are DMs, chunky-heeled boots and ripped jeans all over the place. I realise that as an older person, I am now totally outside the world of the teenage and cannot really understand all its special codes and signifiers (and nor frankly, would I want to), but it seems like these days you can just buy your identity off a shelf in Topshop. Certainly the ripped jeans all seem to be neatly slashed at the knee and the DMs come in any style or colour to suit your quirky personality. Maybe I'm excessively romanticising my own teenage years, but there was a sense of real idividuality to the modifications you could make with a bottle of tippex and some coloured laces. You did it yourself, so you couldn't be confused with the drones who just bought what their parents wanted them to wear; so you could not be mistaken for a part of the system. I'm sure plenty of young people still feel that need to define themselves as apart from the compromised world of adults, to show that they are pure of intention, unsullied by the lazy compromise of their parents' world, it's just that the adults own all the means of them doing so. Their righteous dissent and frustration is neatly packaged and sold back to them or given continual outlet online. In such a world, you can't sell out; you've already bought into everything. When there is a place for everything and your every whim (no matter how angst-ridden) is catered for, you're never really outside the system. Without ever being able to see form the outside, how can you even know the bounds of your world? You learn to love your prison, as it provides everything you think you need, even the impression of alternatives. As you are given an outlet for dissent, you believe that you have agency in the running of the prison; because you get to peep though the panopticon from time to time you think you're included in the administration. It's like an entire society with Stockholm Syndrome. 

I'm not really sure why we would desire to try and break out either, when the outside is likely to be worse, or at least we have no way of knowing it won't. Our prison costs a lot to run and outside those costs are mounting up. So we stay here, we pay lip service to dissent. The youths buy perfectly ripped jeans and Nirvana t-shirts so they can look dissatisfied for a few years whilst working towards a good vocational qualification. They can strop about a bit and rage at the world, but that's just normal teenage behaviour, they'll soon get it out of their system, or the system will work it out of them. 

In the UK at the end of the twentieth century, the last of the discernible music movements were virtually defined by commercialism. Dance music was at least subversive to start with: giving birth to the 1994 Criminal Justice Act. But even before the full weight of the law was applied to stop people having fun, the ravers were being herded out of the fields and into the superclubs where they could be fully exploited by promoters and organised criminals. Britpop on the other hand was simply a commercial manifestation of the indie that had existed in the musical underground for decades. It was defined simply by being commercial indie music. The underground was the mainstream and we all rushed to embrace our new found popularity, happy in a world where anyone can have a beard or long hair or ripped jeans and it will mean precisely nothing. And you know why?

You're a sellout. 

Pronouncements

I have been reading 'Madame Bovary' recently, which, if you haven't read it, I can thoroughly recommend. There are a few passages in there which are particularly striking (I assume this is also the case in the original French) for the succinct ease with which they deal with profound concepts. I think the passage about language being "a cracked kettle" is fairly famous, but I think the passage that struck me most is as follows: "the denigration of those we love always severs us from them a little. Idols must not be touched; the gilt comes off in our hands." 

I suppose it is possible for this to be seen as an endorsement of unrequited love as the only form of love able to endure, but I'm fairly sure that in its context, Flaubert meant it to apply more broadly to relationships. 

You often hear couples who have been together for many decades say that they never go to bed angry at each other, which is sensible, as the passing of a night by its very nature can make a disagreement seem more entrenched, giving the impression that it is more intractable than perhaps it is. It also means that you spend more time in disagreement with each other - even if for most of that time you are asleep - increasing the overall perception that you spend a lot of time in disagreement. And perception is important, because you have to perceive that something is worth the effort to want to make an effort for it. I'm a firm believer that life's what you make it and I don't mean that in a Tory 'the only reason you haven't succeeded is because you're lazy' way, I mean that much of our perception of our life is defined by how we chose to perceive it. Yeah, I know, but I'm talking about the things that we do to define the opinions that become entrenched in our subconscious. If you constantly refer to your partner as 'the ball and chain', you are going to automatically associate them with being a drag; everything they do or say will appear to inconvenience you and you will resent their presence for no reason other than you have predetermined your resentment. Even without continually applying a degrading epithet to your partner, it is easy to build up negative connotations in a relationship just by thinking "they always..." Everyone has disagreements, it would be weird if people didn't: they are different after all. However, we don't have to conflate our lack of agreement with undesirable traits in our partner. Our partners are not perfect; if we chose to represent that imperfection to ourselves as undesirable, then we are probably destined to be alone. Unfortunately I cannot express that as neatly or succinctly as Flaubert. 

Propaganda

I've avoided the various leader 'debates' on this election campaign, as indeed I have found myself listening to the radio less. I can't really deal with the amount of energy that is wasted making empty promises about a few marginal issues that will not affect the long term economic and existential viability of our country. However I can't avoid the news entirely and was pleased to hear that Ed Milliband finally tackled head-on the view (presented as fact for the last five years) that the last Labour government bankrupted the country through financial profligacy. He apologised for the lack of regulation that helped cause the global financial crisis (rightly) but refused to apologise for borrowing against an (apparently) strong economy. Of course the audience member who had asked the question was incredulous, blurting out his own variation on the received wisdom that he has to balance his household budget from week to week, so a government should do as well. Leaving aside the fact that a national economy is nothing like a household economy for the moment, what Ed and chums should really point out is that is exactly what they did. When a household is doing well and you're both earning a decent salary and you've paid off your student debts and you've got a bit of savings, what do most people do? Borrow four times their annual income to buy a house, based on the received wisdom that as we get older our salaries increase and we will not lose our jobs. Once we have factored in the repayments for this debt into our household budget (i.e. balanced it), we think about borrowing more, maybe to buy a car or a conservatory. None of these things unbalance our household budget, because the repayments are within our means, we can pay our mortgage, our car finance etc and still afford a pint at the end of the week (the measure I believe the audience member used). Of course if the company we worked for suddenly went bankrupt, what would we do then? How would we pay for the mortgage and car? Well, we could probably give the car back, but what about the mortgage? We still need a house to live in. If we were confident we might try and get some sort of bridging loan until we got another job or maybe borrow some money to start a business, so we were able to pay the mortgage. We could try to make some savings, maybe by not feeding or clothing our children; after all, what's the point in them having full bellies or clothes if they don't have a house to live in. I guess if we take no action, we'll be out on the street, where we would have to rely on state benefits (assuming this household is in a country that has state benefits). 

Anyone who is not a total idiot will be able to see the crude analogy I am attempting to draw above, but it is less crude than the analogy with household budgets that the current right wing orthodoxy wants us to understand. Of course a national economy is infinitely more complex than a household budget, but even a household budget is more complex than whether you have enough cash in your pocket for a pint at the end of the week. However, as far governments treating the economy like a household budget go, I would say the last labour government did a pretty good impression: borrow against your income whilst your income is good. Interestingly it was households borrowing not against their income, but against the possible future price of their house that caused the last financial crisis. Is that the kind of household budget we want? Given that the current 'recovery' is based almost entirely on a property bubble, the current government's household budget does feel rather subprime. But that's not the narrative; there is only one way to balance this household budget and that is sell the family silver and clothe the children in rags. 

These analogies are crass to the point of being useless, but then so is most of the rest of the 'debate' in this election. 

Port

Even at a time when politicians desperate for your vote will say pretty much any old shit, James Brokenshire's comments on migrants* risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea in leaky boats were pretty special. In case you missed it, he asserted that tighter UK immigration policy would put people off attempting this perilous crossing. I was instantly intrigued to know how many people scrutinise UK migration policy before fleeing war and poverty in their own country to attempt a journey of thousands of miles. I guess they probably go online and check the immigration or asylum policies of all the countries in which they may attempt to seek refuge before starting their journey, see the UK policy and think "that place looks really easy to get into, which is good because otherwise I don't know why I'd leave this war torn hellhole." 

A few days later a survivor of a sunken ship off the coast of Greece - a refugee from the conflict in Syria - offered her own way of stopping the flow of people attempting to get into Europe: "stop the war in Syria". This may come as a surprise to the James Brokenshires of this world, but what actually motivates most people to flee their country of birth and come to Europe is not the promise of endless free benefits (many of them probably have no concept of a welfare state) but the desire not to die. 

So when we ask ourselves what would stop people from other countries trying to come here, the clear answer is: making life bearable in their home country. So next time a politician claims they're going to reduce immigration in this country, you can check that they're talking about increasing the overseas aid budget. 

Of course they won't mean that, they'll mean wasting more of your taxes on the process of shipping people back to their ravaged countries, so they can try and make the journey all over again. For some reason the rhetoric of wasting massive amounts of resources not solving a problem at all plays well with a certain type of voter. Presumably the same sort of voter who likes their mechanic to fix their car's engine by repeatedly changing the tires. So you can look forward to much more tough sounding and utterly ineffectual rhetoric from the likes of James Brokenshire over the coming weeks, because it's apparently what you want. Enjoy. 

* I notice we've stopped even calling them 'asylum seekers', which was the term adopted when it was decided that 'refugee' made them sound too justified in attempting to come to our country. 'Migrant' sounds much better, as implies choice rather than compulsion based on survival. 

Preparation

Someone put a flyer through our door the other day for what was essentially a cramming centre. Their advertised achievement was a boy getting a 'C' in maths in year 5. I don't know what year that is in old money, but I'm guessing it's earlier than one normally gets a GCSE. My instant question is why do it? What do you hope to gain? I did my GCSE maths a year early, which simply allowed me to take three years to do my A-level maths. Obviously that wasn't what my teachers had in mind, but they clearly hadn't reckoned on my exceptional capacity for laziness. Ultimately though, the only reason one would ever do an exam early is to be able to say you did it early (see, even 20 years on, I can't resist), but at what cost? At the cost of actually enjoying the only childhood you'll ever have? I'm not saying that happened to me because it was just one exam one year early and I didn't do any extra classes. However if you're going to extra school after school all the time just to pass exams earlier, just to get through education faster, what then? You get to join the workforce earlier whilst you're younger and more malleable; whilst it's easier to indoctrinate you into the corporate mindset. Of course as an employer in such a situation, most of the heavy lifting has already been done for you. 

There seems to be a bit of a craze at the moment for emulating the success of Chinese education, which has generated hundreds of millions of citizens willing to be locked into the special version of capitalism that their masters have created for them. We may look east pityingly, sorry for all the freedoms that they don't enjoy, but the culture we think of as oppressing the Chinese is simply a vaguely reorganised version of the corporate structure that every modern multinational aspires to: one where the citizens/workers put the good of the country/company above their own personal wellbeing. Of course we all think we're too smart for that, we have a contract with our company, and we can walk away whenever we want, but how would we pay the mortgage if we just quit our jobs, how would we reach that perfect life that sits just beyond our grasp if we don't work for it? It's not just compulsion and coercion though, most companies work very hard at getting their employees to buy into their collective message, an idea that (they hope) goes beyond the basic premise that the company's continued profitability ensures continued employment. Companies want their employees to think of them as an organisation with a higher purpose, one for which it is worth going the extra mile. Ideally this sense of higher purpose should be coupled with a general sense of the generosity of the employer. 

At a recent company evening event, a colleague ponted out that 15 years ago, such an event would have started at lunchtime and taken up the afternoon, to which I responded that in those days he probably wasn't allowed to wear his own clothes every Friday. To my mild astonishment he accepted this as an entirely reasonable exchange, which is interesting given that it's not even true: he can't wear his own clothes on a Friday, not if they're shorts or a football top, or the sleeves are too short, etc, etc. Yet this colleague and so many others like him are seemingly happy to accept that a real terms wage cut is OK if they are allowed to wear a clearly defined set of slightly different clothes one day a week. My issues with 'dress down' days are well known and, I think, entirely justified. 'Dress down' days are the thin end of the corporate bullshit wedge; it is your employer playing make believe at meeting you halfway, whilst still actually dictating every aspect of your working life. They wheel out hundreds of similar ways to 'improve' your happiness at work in the hope that you will ignore the two most obvious ways of acheieving this goal: make you work less and pay you more. The make believe is that there is some higher purpose to your work; that in some way, by continually increasing the profits you make for your employer, the company will reach some never entirely defined corporate nirvana. Of course there can be no actual end point, just an unsustainable ever increasing margin. Regimes such as the one that controls China have an equally nebulous higher purpose. For better or for worse the government that we have ended up with in the western democracies exists largely to administer the state broadly in the interests of the population. In China the government administers the country in the interest of some increasingly I'll-defined ideal, disseminating power through the corporations that it owns. In the west governments have largely ceded power over people's lives to the large corporations, who lack merely their own entirely compliant justice system (and to be fair, when they need one, they just hire it off the nearest government) to fully emulate the politburo of the Chinese communist party. 

The mantra of modern politicians is that they don't want to do anything that could be bad for business, but what if what is good for business is bad for your citizens? What if educating children to be 'fit for the workplace' means grinding away at their souls until they'll accept any old corporate bullshit unquestioningly? 

Education is important, far too important to be left in the hands of those who think it is just a way of churning out compliant worker drones. When you push your children because you want them to have a better life, maybe take a moment to think about what would constitute a better life. Everyone wants the best for their children, but we really need to consider whether a system of education so favoured by corporate vested interests can be best for any individual. Next time you hear someone extolling the virtues of a Chinese-style education system, think about how having everything else Chinese-style has worked out for you. 

Paucity

In my first junior school, we had a succession of Swedish cooks. Each day they would come to our little village school (usually by motorbike) and prepare all of our meals from scratch, fresh each day. Naturally we all hated our school dinners. When, at the age of nine, I moved to North Tyneside, where the school meals were largely mass 'cooked' on an almost industrial scale across the whole county I quickly came to appreciate the culinary delights that I had left behind. It's an old cliché that you don't know what you've got till it's gone, but it might be helpful if we could find a way. A lack of appreciation of our current situation leads to a desire for another. As we are constantly sold the idea that the accumulation of wealth and possessions is the key to our happiness, we continue to accumulate and consume. It is like some sort of compulsion and no one is going persuade us to stop, as our whole economic model is built on the assumption that we will continue to accumulate and consume more and more. No alternative is offered or even considered; it is a one-way process that cannot be reversed or re-routed. We stick so religiously to this orthodoxy that even when the super rich run out of things to spend their obscene wealth on, they search relentlessly for more, still convinced that what they have is not enough or good enough. I recently heard that to fill up the Octopus - Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen's super yacht - with a month's worth of fuel costs $600,000.  And that is just fuel. A 'yacht' like that has no practical use, it's just a way of disposising with excess wealth. If you have enough money to spend $600,000 a month on boat fuel, you have too much money. That is not the politics of envy, it is the politics of basic rationality. 

That kind of example Is probably unhelpful in that it simply presents an extreme so ridiculous that we fail completely to associate with it. We can't see that we are locked into the same cycle of endless dissatisfaction as Paul Allen; we cannot equate our desire to buy the latest iPhone with his desire to posess a ridiculously large boat. Indeed that is part of the problem: we see that Paul Allen has so much more than us and subsequently feel justified in our dissatisfaction that we don't have a little (or a lot) more. So we push ourselves to greater consumption, because if they can have more, so can we. This is the only way that the wealth of the super-rich trickles down - the effect that the right wing is always so keen to accredit to their mates; this is the real politics of envy, it drives our economy on to greater and greater consumption, with the excuse against the consequences that we are not consuming as much as the next person. Constantly comforted that we are not the biggest contributors to the problems of relentless consumption and constantly dissatisfied that we are nowhere near the biggest contributors to the problem, we are happy to drive the the accumulation further and further, not by much, by just enough that we make it to the other side. Where the grass is greener surely.