Saturday 29 August 2009
And another thing
Actually I finished my blog for today, tonight, whatever; but then I remembered. Ah, what. I meant to explain a bit more what’s missing. The question marks.
A phobia can be a learned behaviour or can arise from some incident or trauma in the past. So far so good. It is rooted in the unconscious mind and is therefore available to hypnotherapic (is that a word) intervention.
Yeah, right. I’m gonna regress back to the time a question mark fell out of the sky and knocked me unconscious. I was seven and the question mark was at the end of the question is there a god.
I guess she heard me, the irony. As in, there is a god after all (question mark).
You know what, I could get used to this blog thing. Just need to be a little more light hearted and get some new toothpaste.
Damn, now I’ve got to find another picture.
A phobia can be a learned behaviour or can arise from some incident or trauma in the past. So far so good. It is rooted in the unconscious mind and is therefore available to hypnotherapic (is that a word) intervention.
Yeah, right. I’m gonna regress back to the time a question mark fell out of the sky and knocked me unconscious. I was seven and the question mark was at the end of the question is there a god.
I guess she heard me, the irony. As in, there is a god after all (question mark).
You know what, I could get used to this blog thing. Just need to be a little more light hearted and get some new toothpaste.
Damn, now I’ve got to find another picture.
Lockerbie and the historical world of compassion
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, convicted by a Scottish court of the muder of 270 people on Pan Am flight 103, was last week released on compassionate grounds. He is terminally ill with prostate cancer.
Seems simple enough. Under Section 30 of the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 a prisoner may be released if they are terminally ill and likely to have less than three months to live. Principle is adhered to, mercy serves the interests of justice, justice serves the interests of the state and we have demonstrated once again that all are equal before the law. Even foreign murderers.
Nice. Dispassionate. Objective. Without the shoot first of a lynch mob and the anti-intellectualism of moral outrage.
Except there was moral outrage, with domestic and international protest keen to demonstrate its irrelevance. Read for domestic and international, opponents of the Scottish National Party and America. Their protest has been loud but crucially has no available legal challenge. Unlike Megrahi.
Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary who made the decision, got a pretty hard time. He’s not a hard man but he stood firm and this is politics so what else could he expect. He made the decision on his own as a minister and a lawyer, and he made the decision with the law unequivocally on his side. To those that protest, as Megrahi might point out, you can invade a country but it is much more difficult to invade a principle. Though you can drag a principle along with you when you undertake an invasion, aka holy war, just war, or the-principle-of-capitalism-and-you-have-the-oil war. Megrahi might also point out that though he dropped his appeal had he gone ahead with it he would have had at least a reasonable chance of being cleared of guilt.
I’m drifting, my apologies. I shall haul myself back.
Amongst the more considered arguments against the Justice Secretary, the main charge laid against him seems to be that he was right in law, right in principle, but wrong in everything else. I have difficulty understanding, however, what everything else is.
Does everything else include, for example, decency and common sense. Neither of which are principles, neither of which can be jailed or released, and neither of which behave with much decency or common sense. The actions of Hilary Clinton spring to mind.
Maybe everything else includes time, there generally being less of it than we realise. Time for the families of those murdered. Time for Megrahi’s appeal to be heard and possibly, though improbably, for the truth to out. Time for penitence and suffering and retribution. Time for history to judge.
The problem for history is the problem of politics, an abstraction with a tenuous experience of life, that can neither be solved nor left behind. Politics and history are simultaneous equations whose graphs never cross for the simple reason that there is nothing within them that is necessarily true. 1 + 1 may equal 2 for the woman on the street but in the corridors of power and the past 1 + 1 generally equals 3: there is always either a sufficiently large value of 1 or a sufficiently small value of 3.
Not that principles or the law fares much better. As I understand it 23 terminally ill prisoners have been released in Scotland in the last 16 years. Two things: have there only been 23 terminally ill prisoners in the last 16 years, and how long before death were they released. Not three months, I’d bet my sub prime on that, and my second mortgage that more than a few have died in jail. The last few pennies I’d bet on one of the motivating factors for those that were released being the bureaucratic nightmare of someone dying in jail. I suppose that’s one form of compassion, the administrators having compassion for themselves.
In effect the rule of law and the principle which underpin it are, in Western democratic form, a species of bureaucratic humanism. Was it really compassion that led to Megrahi’s release, or a deal struck to secure British interests in Libyan oil, or neither or both. In some ways it doesn’t matter, in the way that Iran Air Flight 655 doesn’t matter. Its all part of the bureaucratic administration of the interests of the state, the political appropriation of values, and the history in the moment that makes the same mistakes it keeps trying to forget.
Megrahi may be a murderer, William C. Rogers unequivocally is. Captain of the USS Vincennes, he found it inexplicably difficult too distinguish between a civilian airliner broadcasting itself as such and ascending a civilian flight path, and an F14 fighter descending to attack.
In the end Megrahi and Rogers both shape shift in the realm of politics, and both are footnotes in history. In another ten years we’ll barely be able to find them.
My question is, what does compassion mean when 560 people die. Not at the moment of their death but afterwards, when all the hatred is done. The law doesn’t hate Megrahi, but then it never loved those that were killed. Compassion is a quality not a principle. As a quality it shows us something about ourselves, as a principle it is a currency that every day is traded in.
But then when the interests of a country are at stake who wouldn’t trade in their compassion, either for the political mileage or failing that a new car.
Seems simple enough. Under Section 30 of the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 a prisoner may be released if they are terminally ill and likely to have less than three months to live. Principle is adhered to, mercy serves the interests of justice, justice serves the interests of the state and we have demonstrated once again that all are equal before the law. Even foreign murderers.
Nice. Dispassionate. Objective. Without the shoot first of a lynch mob and the anti-intellectualism of moral outrage.
Except there was moral outrage, with domestic and international protest keen to demonstrate its irrelevance. Read for domestic and international, opponents of the Scottish National Party and America. Their protest has been loud but crucially has no available legal challenge. Unlike Megrahi.
Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary who made the decision, got a pretty hard time. He’s not a hard man but he stood firm and this is politics so what else could he expect. He made the decision on his own as a minister and a lawyer, and he made the decision with the law unequivocally on his side. To those that protest, as Megrahi might point out, you can invade a country but it is much more difficult to invade a principle. Though you can drag a principle along with you when you undertake an invasion, aka holy war, just war, or the-principle-of-capitalism-and-you-have-the-oil war. Megrahi might also point out that though he dropped his appeal had he gone ahead with it he would have had at least a reasonable chance of being cleared of guilt.
I’m drifting, my apologies. I shall haul myself back.
Amongst the more considered arguments against the Justice Secretary, the main charge laid against him seems to be that he was right in law, right in principle, but wrong in everything else. I have difficulty understanding, however, what everything else is.
Does everything else include, for example, decency and common sense. Neither of which are principles, neither of which can be jailed or released, and neither of which behave with much decency or common sense. The actions of Hilary Clinton spring to mind.
Maybe everything else includes time, there generally being less of it than we realise. Time for the families of those murdered. Time for Megrahi’s appeal to be heard and possibly, though improbably, for the truth to out. Time for penitence and suffering and retribution. Time for history to judge.
The problem for history is the problem of politics, an abstraction with a tenuous experience of life, that can neither be solved nor left behind. Politics and history are simultaneous equations whose graphs never cross for the simple reason that there is nothing within them that is necessarily true. 1 + 1 may equal 2 for the woman on the street but in the corridors of power and the past 1 + 1 generally equals 3: there is always either a sufficiently large value of 1 or a sufficiently small value of 3.
Not that principles or the law fares much better. As I understand it 23 terminally ill prisoners have been released in Scotland in the last 16 years. Two things: have there only been 23 terminally ill prisoners in the last 16 years, and how long before death were they released. Not three months, I’d bet my sub prime on that, and my second mortgage that more than a few have died in jail. The last few pennies I’d bet on one of the motivating factors for those that were released being the bureaucratic nightmare of someone dying in jail. I suppose that’s one form of compassion, the administrators having compassion for themselves.
In effect the rule of law and the principle which underpin it are, in Western democratic form, a species of bureaucratic humanism. Was it really compassion that led to Megrahi’s release, or a deal struck to secure British interests in Libyan oil, or neither or both. In some ways it doesn’t matter, in the way that Iran Air Flight 655 doesn’t matter. Its all part of the bureaucratic administration of the interests of the state, the political appropriation of values, and the history in the moment that makes the same mistakes it keeps trying to forget.
Megrahi may be a murderer, William C. Rogers unequivocally is. Captain of the USS Vincennes, he found it inexplicably difficult too distinguish between a civilian airliner broadcasting itself as such and ascending a civilian flight path, and an F14 fighter descending to attack.
In the end Megrahi and Rogers both shape shift in the realm of politics, and both are footnotes in history. In another ten years we’ll barely be able to find them.
My question is, what does compassion mean when 560 people die. Not at the moment of their death but afterwards, when all the hatred is done. The law doesn’t hate Megrahi, but then it never loved those that were killed. Compassion is a quality not a principle. As a quality it shows us something about ourselves, as a principle it is a currency that every day is traded in.
But then when the interests of a country are at stake who wouldn’t trade in their compassion, either for the political mileage or failing that a new car.
Tuesday 25 August 2009
Currently I am reading
Elektra Assassin, by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz. Published by Epic Comics 1986.
Innovative in its time, with the cynicism you’d expect.
Innovative in its time, with the cynicism you’d expect.
Monday 24 August 2009
My foot
Before we go any further let me quote the great man:
Yeah, well I saw it on TV first, then I made it up.
In total there were seventeen contestants. I counted them all out and I counted them all back. Not one of them crashed and burned. The atmosphere was retroholic, more serious than the 60s studentville frock and beards found in the trendsetter alcoves just now. Most of them had decked out their lives from the 70s, with original cars and furniture, even fridges. Their clothes had been taken out from the back of a wardrobe and made to live again. That kind of dedication is generally its own reward.
The question that mattered however was: was it good. Good enough, every last eau de cologne too cool to sweat sweaty moment of it. At the end I tripped on the stairs and nearly broke my foot. Back then I was young, the bruising only took a few weeks to clear up.
Thinking about it nearly is one of life’s most underrated words, the opposite of probably. I nearly became a millionaire, my numbers came up, but that week I forgot to buy a ticket. I nearly became happy buying up everything that would fit me in the store. I nearly didn’t regret taking on so much credit. Nearly is a word the advertising guidelines accept and the advertisers don’t.
Nearly, my foot. It wouldn’t have been my foot prior to 1923, before then it would’ve been my ass. But the English are a polite race who apparently become easily confused when presented with something that looks rather similar to a mule or a donkey. This is not an ass, as the more rhetorically inclined might say.
On the subject, check out Forever Fever, if you can get hold of it. Try eBay. It’s a Singapore film Tony Manero would nearly approve of. Something along the lines of patriarchy plus state plus disco equals soul.
Sunday 23 August 2009
On advertising
I feel there’s a whole bunch of stuff you should know. Knowledge they say is power, therefore I grant you power :
Feet on their own are interesting things, feet attached to people less so. People have a habit of not communicating properly with their feet. Taking them for granted. Dressing them in a style more suited to their eyes. As a consequence feet protest, and when their protestations are met with abuse they grow a thick skin. How many bathrooms up and down the country have a pumice stone as catharsis for exactly this problem.
Watching your feet grow is like being a minor figure in a tragedy, hovering on the edge of great and terrible things. Watching helplessly as the acts pass and it all goes tits up. Verrucas, corns, misshapen toes and dry skin. The solution is simple, talk to them. Babies know how to do this even before they learn how to speak. Try keeping a baby’s foot out of its mouth. Its as impossible as keeping your own foot out of your own mouth, except that baby and foot enjoy it being there.
So what has any of this got to do with advertising. Nothing, I never said that it did. But if it did then it would be like Carlsberg, probably the best blog not on advertising in the world.
- I don’t work in advertising
- I spend most of my time in a small town in England called Madchester
- Nobody calls it Madchester any more
- I used to fit shoes for a living
Feet on their own are interesting things, feet attached to people less so. People have a habit of not communicating properly with their feet. Taking them for granted. Dressing them in a style more suited to their eyes. As a consequence feet protest, and when their protestations are met with abuse they grow a thick skin. How many bathrooms up and down the country have a pumice stone as catharsis for exactly this problem.
Watching your feet grow is like being a minor figure in a tragedy, hovering on the edge of great and terrible things. Watching helplessly as the acts pass and it all goes tits up. Verrucas, corns, misshapen toes and dry skin. The solution is simple, talk to them. Babies know how to do this even before they learn how to speak. Try keeping a baby’s foot out of its mouth. Its as impossible as keeping your own foot out of your own mouth, except that baby and foot enjoy it being there.
So what has any of this got to do with advertising. Nothing, I never said that it did. But if it did then it would be like Carlsberg, probably the best blog not on advertising in the world.
Saturday 22 August 2009
Trackday two
The great thing about time is that it carries on going forward, at least within our perception of temporal mechanics. That means we get to look back at things, failed relationships for instance. And blog posts.
I realised that I forgot to mention the colour of the cars in the previous post. The Ferrari was obviously red in the same way that the sky is obviously blue, except at night when its black, or there’s cloud cover. Or at sunrise and sunset for that matter. The Porsche was grey, like the sky. Only less obviously so.
On the subject of sunrise and sunset, it shows how readily we accept illusion. If we don’t have a better explanation then common sense prevails. I’m not a big fan of common sense, its an invention of the flat earth society, a kind of deliberate ignorance of the evidence, replacing curvature with spin. An all of the people all of the time advertising.
Nobody believes the earth is flat any more, except Dave. He even has his own channel devoted to that belief. And the Flat Earth Society, which admittedly is a little bit weak since the death of Charles Johnson. (I wanted to write Charles Bronson but only one of him is dead.) Which is curious because the fact that nobody believes in a flat earth doesn’t stop us from behaving as if we still did. What shall we do with the planet this week. Blow it up. Nah, that’s too violent. Slowly and all too perceptibly destroy all of its primary ecosystems and the equilibrium that’s sustained multi-celled life for millions of years. Yeah, that’s it, that’s what we’ll do. After all, the sun still spins round the earth.
I realised that I forgot to mention the colour of the cars in the previous post. The Ferrari was obviously red in the same way that the sky is obviously blue, except at night when its black, or there’s cloud cover. Or at sunrise and sunset for that matter. The Porsche was grey, like the sky. Only less obviously so.
On the subject of sunrise and sunset, it shows how readily we accept illusion. If we don’t have a better explanation then common sense prevails. I’m not a big fan of common sense, its an invention of the flat earth society, a kind of deliberate ignorance of the evidence, replacing curvature with spin. An all of the people all of the time advertising.
Nobody believes the earth is flat any more, except Dave. He even has his own channel devoted to that belief. And the Flat Earth Society, which admittedly is a little bit weak since the death of Charles Johnson. (I wanted to write Charles Bronson but only one of him is dead.) Which is curious because the fact that nobody believes in a flat earth doesn’t stop us from behaving as if we still did. What shall we do with the planet this week. Blow it up. Nah, that’s too violent. Slowly and all too perceptibly destroy all of its primary ecosystems and the equilibrium that’s sustained multi-celled life for millions of years. Yeah, that’s it, that’s what we’ll do. After all, the sun still spins round the earth.
Thursday 20 August 2009
Trackday one
So why Trackdayspecial. No particular reason, other than I recently spent a day stood on the side of a track watching various forms of exotica blip past in the distance. It didn’t rain, which was good. The day lasted forever, which wasn’t.
I need to confess at this point I have an aversion to question marks, a bit like a phobia of buttons. Can you get through the day without seeing a button. It's the same with question marks.
The question I asked myself stood at the side of the track was why am I here. A three hundred quid birthday present for someone I love. (Yes, I’m lying, it was one fifty nine and we were only there for three hours. It felt longer. The point remains valid.)
What point. Standing at the side of a track for three hours so the person who’s present it was could get exactly nine minutes of track time. Someone was getting rich and it wasn’t me.
For the record they drove a Ferrari F430 and a Porsche 911 Carrera 2. Three laps in each. Just enough to know how the other one percent lives, get the first inkling of an addiction, eat ice cream on the way home. Wonderful stuff ice cream, if it had been freely available in the nineteenth century there never would have been a working class movement. It’s a metaphor for the middle class. Ask the guy that leases the Ferrari that someone drives for three and a half minutes.
So why did I get the present in the first place. It’s a dream. Not my dream. In my dream the fat lady crosses the road and gets run over by a white transit van just as she opens her mouth to sing. Thunk. What was that.
I need to confess at this point I have an aversion to question marks, a bit like a phobia of buttons. Can you get through the day without seeing a button. It's the same with question marks.
The question I asked myself stood at the side of the track was why am I here. A three hundred quid birthday present for someone I love. (Yes, I’m lying, it was one fifty nine and we were only there for three hours. It felt longer. The point remains valid.)
What point. Standing at the side of a track for three hours so the person who’s present it was could get exactly nine minutes of track time. Someone was getting rich and it wasn’t me.
For the record they drove a Ferrari F430 and a Porsche 911 Carrera 2. Three laps in each. Just enough to know how the other one percent lives, get the first inkling of an addiction, eat ice cream on the way home. Wonderful stuff ice cream, if it had been freely available in the nineteenth century there never would have been a working class movement. It’s a metaphor for the middle class. Ask the guy that leases the Ferrari that someone drives for three and a half minutes.
So why did I get the present in the first place. It’s a dream. Not my dream. In my dream the fat lady crosses the road and gets run over by a white transit van just as she opens her mouth to sing. Thunk. What was that.
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