Whoever Wins We Lose

That was the strapline for 2004’s “AVP: Alien vs Predator” - a showdown between two hideous, misanthropic powers in which ordinary people like you and I feature only as collateral damage. Does that sound familiar?

Yes, it's another post about the EU referendum. 

Given the choice between having a living embryo implanted in me which would eventually gnaw its way out of my chest and being hunted for sport, I would probably have to come down in support of the Predator.

But when it comes to voting for Brexit or Bremain, it’s not quite such a clear-cut choice. Our ballot papers arrived yesterday and - having just last week urged all of you to vote FOR something rather than AGAINST - I don’t know what I’m going to do. Brabstention is not an option, but Brapathy and Brisgust are exerting a lot of Brinertia on me.

Why it’s hard to vote Brexit

At the risk of offending my bien-pensant friends who suffer no such atavistic urges, there’s a part of me that wants to vote Brexit. It’s roughly the same part that made me an insufferable teenage wannabe Marxist windbag, an insufferable “punker than thou” music snob and various other species of insufferable arse over the years.

It’s that “anti” attitude which makes one’s default position one of opposition to/distaste for whatever exists in favour of an alternative that doesn’t. 

“Some men just want to watch the world burn”, said butler Alfred in The Dark Knight (a film about a man who dresses up as a bat to fight a man who dresses up as a clown). I’m not sure if that’s quite Roger of Sicily, but I certainly am one of those people who is attracted by a desire to see the look on a lot of people’s faces the day after a “Leave” vote.

But then I think about Boris Johnson’s face and Nigel Farage’s face… And I think, as much as I would like to treat “the issues” completely separately from “the personalities”, it’s these awful people who would be the power in the land come June 23rd.

And as well as believing in leaving the EU (debatable in Boris Johnson’s case), most of these people also hold a lot of other opinions I strongly disagree with. Intellectual, libertarian Brexiteers like Douglas Carswell have disappeared, so that voting in favour of leaving the EU cannot be separated from voting in favour of a whole lot of nativist, racist, social-authoritarian, revanchist “back to the Empire” idiocy. 

We do not have the option of voting for one without voting for the other. Some people are happy with that, but I’m not.

The downside of the Singaporean model

A case could be made for a post-EU Britain reviving itself economically and culturally once the dead hand of Brussels was cast off - although the only version I’ve seen to date is a suggestion that we follow the example of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, which is hardly a great model for liberals and democrats.

However, the forces that would take power in the event of a Brexit vote have no idea of how they would achieve that. If they do, they’re keeping it quiet, because I can only assume that it would be to subject the UK to the sort of neo-Thatcherite deregulatory shock therapy the former Eastern Bloc underwent after 1989.

The Brexit camps encompass a lot of different positions, but it’s the entitled, right wing, economic know-nothings who would be in power in Brexit wins. That’s the problem. And that's why I have trouble voting for them.

Why it’s hard to vote Bremain

“I'll forgive and forget, If you say you'll never go. 'Cos its true what they say - It's better the devil you know” said Kylie Miongue in her 1990 number 2 hit, “Better The Devil You Know”.

If taken literally, that is surely one of the most pessimistic and retrograde messages ever committed to CD, vinyl and cassette. Yet it is the sum total of the Remain camp’s argument: everything will be worse if you seek change. You are powerless to improve your lot in life, so surrender to your fate.

Thanks a lot Kylie.

Let me make one thing clear: I love the many different cultures and peoples of Europe. I feel a shared sense of pride in our cultural and economic achievements and a shared sense of shame and humility in the face of our crimes and tragedies. It’s obvious that in a globalised world, some things are better done at a supranational level. I love the German language, French wine, Spanish holidays, Scandinavian crime dramas, Greek philosophy, Balkan brass bands, full English breakfasts, Italian coffee, Slovenian avant-garde industrial music, Swiss AND Belgian chocolate and more. I think I am as far from a Little Englander as it’s possible to be. A real union of Europe would be a magnificent thing. 

But the European Union we actually have is a rotten, corporatist, undemocratic mess. Surely the negativity of the Remain campaign reflects the fact that when you consider the EU on its own merits - as opposed to the spirit it is intended to (but does not) embody or the merits of others it ascribes to itself (eg lack of European war) - it's pretty hard to get enthusiastic about. 

Within the EU, the idea that every political problem has a technocratic solution has metastatized into a self-congratulatory, anti-pluralist “because we say so”, embodied in Jean-Claude Juncker’s warning that “deserters will not be welcomed back” in the event of a Brexit vote.

If the technocrats were competent you might have more sympathy, but they’re not. The story of Greece is just the most glaring example - allowed into the Euro on data everyone knew was false to prove a political point, now reduced to penury for the sake of international bondholders. And that’s what happens to non-deserters...

Europe will continue to exist and Britain will continue to be a part of Europe whether the UK is in the EU or not. Whether the EU survives much longer with or without the UK is another question entirely. 

So endorsing our continued participation in this arrogant shambles is something I find it hard to put my vote towards. 

There you have it: that’s my dilemma. If I follow my own advice and vote FOR one side rather than AGAINST the other, I am unavoidably voting FOR something I find repulsive. 

Not as repulsive as John Hurt’s gruesome demise in Alien, but not far off. 

Don't Make Me Think!

Along with “when is ODHSNM coming back?” and “what are you doing behind those bushes?”, the question I have been asked most in recent months is “how should I vote in the EU referendum?”

Long-time readers will recall that this blog has been on the wrong side of every major political controversy of recent years – from proportional representation, through Scottish independence, to Albania’s 2011 Eurovision entry.

As such, the hordes of journalists, pundits and other halfwit gobshites that make up “the media” have been clamouring (so far fruitlessly) to elicit the views of Roger of Sicily – knowing, of course, that whatever he says will be precisely that thing which fails to come to pass. Like the political inverse of Paul the psychic octopus.  

My molluscular counterpart

Well, before I give you your instructions, let me talk about the two campaigns for a moment. Last year, I said that the 2015 general election campaign was depressing, but never have I seen a more dismal spectacle than both sides of this EU referendum debate.

Remain appears not to have a positive case to put for EU membership, or if they do they are afraid to make it, and so fall back on increasingly laughable and outlandish claims about how terrible the consequences of not voting for them will be.

Leave, in turn, seems to have gone beyond making any sort of argument for its point of view and just wants to stamp its feet and shout about how everything is unfair – like a surly five-year-old up long past his bedtime.  

Both campaigns – like the Donald Trump phenomenon in the USA – show how we are now in a post-factual political culture. I’m not claiming that coinage – I got it from this article, but it’s probably been around for ages. As Ronald Reagan said (or maybe he didn’t) “facts are stupid things”.

To the partisans of both sides, facts are only facts to the extent that they support their particular point of view. Claims of fact that contradict it are not simply mistaken – they are wilful, deliberate lies put forth by the selfish (if not outright evil) opposition to manipulate you, you poor innocent dupe.

There are good arguments to be made for staying in the EU. And there are good arguments to be made for leaving the EU. Some of those arguments - on both sides – are based on true facts about the world. Some of them are based on value-judgments, which I don’t believe can ever be true or false. I’m kinda old fashioned in believing that the world we live in is a mixture of facts and values, that aren’t always compatible with one another.  

There are good arguments on both sides of his referendum debate, but no one appears to be making them. We seem to have reached a point where every genuine point of disagreement devolves into “culture war”, which is an infantile kind of politics. It comes from the same place as the ever-growing enthusiasm for conspiracy theories – and that place is simply intellectual laziness.

It’s laziness that’s the problem with “the public” – it’s not stupidity.

Because it’s hard to deal with a situation where both sides can be partly right and partly wrong, and you have to choose between options that aren’t simply black and white, isn’t it? And it’s even harder to take responsibility for your choice!

It’s a lot easier to say that you are right because your heart is in the right place; that facts that don’t fit are lies; and that people who disagree with you are not just wrong but also bad.

Not the answer

Just like it’s a lot easier to say that everything is controlled by corporations or the Jews or space lizards than it is to admit that the world is complicated and maybe – just maybe – you don’t actually understand all of it.

Just like it’s so much easier to say “they’re all the same” than it is to listen to what the differences are and take the responsibility of judging and justifying your judgement.

What depresses me the most is how this line of argument (if you can call it that) has been taken up by ordinary people. My Facebook news feed (for example) is full of people I otherwise like and respect, on both sides, making the most ridiculous claims – not about the merits of their own opinions, but of the malign intentions of anyone who holds the opposing view. Again and again, I see the opinion-cart put in front of the fact-horse, without regard to the stable door of complex, imperfect reality.

I’m as bad as any of you. I’m sitting here behind my ironic facade – does he really mean it? Or is he joking? Who will be the first to pose the immortal question “U OK hun?”

No, I’m not going to tell you how to vote. I don’t know how I’m going to vote, and when I do, I will take responsibility for it.  Just vote however you’re going to vote for the right reasons. Don’t vote against anyone. Vote for something.

122 days until I am 40

It occurred to me this morning that there are 122 days remaining until I turn 40 years of age. That’s 122 days INCLUSIVE of today and my upcoming birthday. 

That’s an imposing milestone; one so imposing, in fact, that it has spurred me out of more than five months’ slumber to start writing ODHSNM again.

To those who have missed me, what can I say? At a certain point, the excuse I had prepared – that I had forgotten the log-in details for Blogger – actually became true.

All sorts of mad shit has happened since April when I declared (somewhat prematurely, I now realise) that I wanted to become a children’s entertainer. I’m sure that you were crying out for the interpretive wisdom of Roger of Sicily to help make sense of it all. When you needed me, I wasn’t there for you. Soz an’ all.

What does it mean to be approaching 40? When I was a boy, I remember thinking “in the year 2000 I will be 24”. It seemed impossibly distant, not least because as a subscriber to 2000AD I had very clear ideas about the degrees of technological advance and societal breakdown that would need to  be gone through before we arrived there.

Today, I have written down a series of goals that I will attempt to achieve in the next 122 days. Well, 121 days. If all the things I dislike, disavow and regret about myself could be brought under the heading of a single word, that word would be “habit”. My goals are all about breaking habits. I’m going to write about how I get on – to keep you all amused and to keep myself honest. And to make it so that not every single blog post title for 2015 starts with the word "it". 

It’s Party Time

Who you gonna call? HE MAN

When I am finally kicked out of my current job, I will have to give serious consideration to the idea of becoming a children’s entertainer.

You may assume that this is because all I really want in life is to bring laughter to the bright little faces of boys and girls, and yet have found myself – tragically – counting someone else’s shitty money for a living.

Not at all.

It is because, through some mysterious, ineffable quality, I find myself being uncharacteristically good at it. I am good at it without actually trying – which is by far the best way to be good at anything.

Don’t ask me why, but children find me effortlessly charming, delightful and invigorating in a way I can only dream of being viewed by fellow adults. It is equally mystifying to my wife, Katie...errr...I mean Elvira of Castille, as it is to me. I am also fully CRB-checked.

So this weekend, I found myself Master of Ceremonies at the birthday celebrations of my elder child (Roger Jr). In this capacity, I was responsible for the amusement and safety of approximately 40 children aged 4 to 7, equipped only with a 15-song musical playlist, two jars of sweets, some balloons and an oversized cardboard Minecraft head.

Those who know me only from my pre-parental life may regard this as a scenario akin to handing a chimpanzee a loaded machine gun and a bottle of scotch and solemnly asking it not to cause any trouble.

Well, I have changed a lot in seven years...

My objectives were clear -which I find to be an indispensible element of any successful undertaking:

• Wear these children out enough that they would sit through an hour-long magic show without going Lord of the Flies on the magician (who, I should add, kicked off his act in style with a sincere threat to walk out if he was booed).
• Ensure everyone survives until the food is ready.
• To the extent that it is compatible with objectives 1 and 2, permit fun to occur.  

I don’t really know how or why, but my series of “games” proved a great success. Nobody won, nobody lost. While the states “in” and “out” formally existed, there was no practical distinction between the two. The only real difference between each game was whether I was bellowing the order to “run over there” with or without a musical accompaniment.

It is an intoxicating experience, having an audience hanging on your every word and obeying your every command. I can assure you, the feeling of power and possibility is only marginally diminished by having several members of your otherwise rapt congregation smacking you over the head with a balloon while you deliver your proclamations. The Pope, Hitler and Martin Luther King never had that to contend with. 

This is what it's like

It would be wrong to say that my audience was under my control. A surfer who rides a giant wave only gives the appearance of having mastery over the unstoppable force which could overtake him and drag him under at any moment. If you hesitate or show any fear or doubt, you’re finished. You can only know what it’s like if you’ve been there.

Even my own kids (the aforementioned Roger Jr and four-year-old Tancred) were largely swept away in the madness of the crowd, and played the games along with the others for almost a full two thirds of my allocated slot.

It is practically unheard-of that so much time (20 minutes) should pass before the irresistible temptation to commandeer a monopoly of Daddy’s attention kicks in.

Of course, each son was only responding to an “amber alert” in their own scale of priorities – amber being parental attention focused on any person other than themselves. A red alert, of course, is invoked only if that other person is their brother. At this point the doctrine of struggle by any means necessary through to victory at any cost is immediately put into action. Fortunately, the crisis never escalated to that level from which – as you know – there can be no turning back.

So my stint as a children’s entertainer ended with Tancred sitting on my knee, demanding to be bounced up and down and Roger Jr attempting to prise the iPad out of my hands to play “What Does The Fox Say” for yet another unsolicited encore.

But in terms of the goals I set out to achieve, I have no hesitation in declaring in the whole experience an unalloyed triumph.

We all have our talents – some more valuable, dignified and lucrative than others. I seem to be good at keeping the attention of primary school children for short periods of time.

However, I am fully booked for the upcoming months and therefore not available for your child’s party. Maybe next year. 

It's Not You - It's Me

“In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve,” said Joseph de Maistre. He didn’t mean it in a good way.

I have lived through quite a few general election campaigns and paid good deal of attention to the last few. I have never witnessed one this depressing.

It has, however, at least given us something new – alongside the traditional all-you-can-eat dogshit buffet – in the form of parties campaigning on the basis of who a vote for them would exclude from a future coalition government.

That the political parties and the media have utter, naked contempt for us – the voters – is not new.

But in the past, the voters have always at least been allowed the “king for a day, fool for a lifetime” privilege of being treated as though it was them who choose the government. Not this time. Now we are being treated to the spectacle of post-election coalition wrangling before any ballots have even been cast.

As anyone who voted Lib Dem or Conservative in 2010 – and cared – will have noticed, you can’t be sure that what it says on the tin bears even the scantest resemblance to what’s inside any more. Not, of course, that you ever could, I suppose. It was a “coalition” of a different sort that inflicted the Iraq War on the world.

I'd much rather have than one of these than a school for my kids

It’s a common lament that the political media focuses too much on personalities and not enough on policies. That’s true up to a point: apart from being pretty sure that whoever wins, taxpayers like me will be expected to stump up £100 billion for Trident (the most expensive sock stuffed down the underpants in human history), I have very little idea what else the various parties are offering. Or rather are pretending to offer right now in the hope of fooling enough of us peasants into putting them in power so that – much like Charles I – they can do whatever the fuck they like without reference to us for five more years.

OK, so the political class despises us and we despise them. But considering how many needy neurotics the British public is clearly made up of, it surprises me how rarely anyone seems to wonder “what if it’s not everyone else – what if it’s me?”

What if the public gets held in contempt because it never disproves that it is WORTHY of contempt? In the past, people could kid themselves that it was the papers shoving “who is the best-dressed leader’s wife?” articles down their throats – now the analytics will prove that THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT, if they have to have politics at all.

So what’s the answer? Well, clearly not voting isn’t it.

A year or so ago (back when I used to blog regularly...) I wrote in praise of Russell Brand and his anti-voting point of view. Actually, it was less a blog about Russell Brand and more of an opportunity to quote long passages from HG Wells, with whom I was then obsessed.

Over a hundred years ago – A HUNDRED YEARS AGO! - Wells said that democratic elections give ordinary people “an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control”.

All that’s changed is the number of party organisations.

Best-dressed party leader, 1922

Churchill said:

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

I sympathise a bit with the idea of refusing to participate in a charade of democracy. But then I have no doubt whatsoever that the people who make it most frequently and loudly are precisely those who would shirk the responsibility of an active, participatory democracy most vigorously.

It IS much easier to criticise than to come up with a constructive alternative - and it's even easier to parrot criticisms other people have thought up for you. 

That doesn’t mean that your criticisms should be ignored just because you don’t have all the answers. But if all the carping about politicians all being the same etc was put to some constructive use – who knows? – maybe an alternative that doesn’t equate everything that is not precisely what we have now with totalitarianism or dictatorship could be figured out.

We get bland mannequins like Cameron and Miliband because we demand them. We have earned them. 90% of government is administration and the remaining 10% is presentation (mostly making out that the other is Hitler or Mao or whatever).

Come on! The difference between “destroying the NHS” and “saving the NHS” is a fractional difference in budget and private sector involvement AND YOU KNOW that any promise made on these points will be treated as negotiable in future. What we are seeing on a large scale is the narcissism of small differences literally played out in all its tribal idiocy.

They don’t believe it. You don’t believe it. So why are we doing this at all?

It’s Nerf or Nothing

I’m not a pacifist. I think that violence is the only answer to certain questions. Like the interwar writer and peace campaigner Storm Jameson said about the Nazis, I accept that some things are worth killing for.

But that doesn’t mean that I approve of or like militarism and the glamorisation of violence that we – and especially our kids – seem to be subjected to. Violence is an evil that is occasionally necessary.

As a general rule, Elvira and I have discouraged our boys from having toy guns. Not entirely out of explicit principle – I still remember my boyhood friend in the 1980s who was kicked out of the Woodcraft Folk for drawing a picture of a cannon, which seems to be a matter of putting the cart before the horse – but at least partly because we don’t want them to develop a casual attitude towards the prospect of killing others.

Because that’s what an awful lot of what boys get exposed to through child-oriented media seems to promote. Most of the cartoons that they choose to watch and the video games they choose to play involve fighting of some sort.

Also speaks like a 1930s gangster - WHY?

OK, you expect stuff like that in things like Ben 10 but when the bloody Care Bears are apparently referencing the Vietnam War (or rather films about the Vietnam War) by shouting “fire in the hold” and “incoming!” there’s surely some cultural mutation that’s gone a bit wrong.

Alright, little kids are not likely to get the references (and when did “referencing” things become clever in itself anyway?) but why make the reference to war or war films other than to consciously or unconsciously normalise and make attractive the idea of war?

I grew up as a little militarist through no direct fault of my parents but just by exposure to a pro-violence culture. I thought the Falklands War was the coolest thing ever, primarily because we (Britain) won. In pretty much any scenario, to me and my friends, the baddies were the Germans – despite the Second World War having ended more than 30 years before we were born.

What scientists look like

The hangover from these assumptions are still present today. Watch any cartoon. If there’s a mad or evil scientist in it, he will have a German accent. And he may well be wearing a monocle, which is a cliché that was outdated even by 1939.

Thankfully, we are little more careful today than to casually demonise other races and nationalities to our children. An Afghanistan or Iraq-based version of “Battle Comic” is unimaginable.

Nevertheless, kids are still fed the idea that there is such a thing as cannon-fodder which can be “destroyed” (note the regular use of phrases about “destroying” someone in cartoons as a blatant euphemism for “killing” them) without consequence. It’s just that today it’s robots or aliens or something else non-human that’s been placed outside our moral community, not Japs or Krauts.

To be honest, I think it would do more good to children to show one of these “destroyed” aliens screaming in pain, shitting itself and crying out for its mother than sanitising death to the point where they’re indifferent to it. But instead, we just see the fallen body flash and then disappear – if we even think about it at all. This indifference was parodied to great effect in the first Austin Powers movie, where we saw the henchman’s wife finding out he’d been killed.  

This all brings me on to Nerf guns. Our kids got some of these for Xmas. I wish they hadn’t. Now, if the people who got them are reading this – in no way am I having a go at you about this. Guns are appropriate and popular presents for boys. That’s just the world we live in, whether we like it or not. They were always going to end up with toy guns, it was just a matter of when. The kids loved them and I’m not going to deny that even I enjoyed playing with them.

It looked like this

I had toy guns when I was a young ‘un, ranging from cowboy revolvers to replica M16s. I particularly remember my own Mauser automatic pistol – which, being German, was inherently an evil weapon.

Apart from spud guns though, I don’t think they fired anything. Nerf guns fire sponge darts with a soft plastic tip. They use what appears to be the same mechanism as used by air guns (I stand to be corrected if that’s wrong – it’s not like I do any research here...). They propel those darts with a surprising amount of force. If you got shot with one, it would sting a bit.

Now I’m sure Nerf and other “airsoft” stuff is safe enough to comply with legal standards and that you’d really have to be doing something stupid in order to have somebody’s eye out with one. You can certainly throw a ball, or a toy car, or a rocking horse at someone’s head and do them just as much if not more harm as you can by shooting them with a Nerf gun.

But have you seen the adverts for Nerf stuff? They feature paramilitarised American teenagers – old enough to impress kiddies and young enough to frighten the grown-ups – romping around, Call of Duty-style, discharging blasts from their rapid-fire, multi-barrelled plastic guns, and then proclaiming in a voice laced with menace that “it’s Nerf or nothing”.

If this was taking place in real life, they would – of course – be shooting at each other, or unwilling nerds. But that can’t be shown on TV. And nobody is likely to get very excited about shooting tin cans any more.

So do you know how they’ve got round that problem? Bloody zombies.

Yes, Nerf “zombie strike” weapons are for shooting zombies: kids today’s Germans.

Zombies offer the advantage of having the precise same anatomy as a human being whilst it is nevertheless unambiguously ok to shoot them because they’re evil or because it’s self-defence or something. This is a Nerf machete. Only for killing zombies, obviously.

In no way does this desensitive kids to violence...

And so Nerf takes us over the line from cartoon violence into real world violence where we go around pointing guns at human-shaped objects that we understand to be incapable of suffering and/or deserving of death. And when we pull the trigger, we don’t just get a feeble “rat a tat” noise like we used to – we launch something that behaves very much like a bullet. 

OK Bye Now 2014

OK, so you probably thought I’d just given up writing this blog by now, right?

Yes, it’s been nearly three months since I put anything on here. But just because I haven’t been writing it doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking of you, ODHSNM.

It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been really busy at work. I forgot the login details. Plus, the world in 2014 is so ridiculous there’s very little I can add to it here. This picture – from the quaint North Yorkshire village of Hutton-Le-Hole – sums it up for me, pretty much.

I’ll do better next year, I promise. Assuming the world doesn’t come to an end or nuffink.

So, I will bid you farewell for this year my second photo summing up the year, from a kid’s playground in Wrose. Have a splendid Christmas you magnificent bastards!