Ed Halliwell's Blog

You don’t have to be black to be assaulted by police in America

Don’t get me wrong: it’s pretty clear that it helps. But US police will lavish their inhumane power-tripping abuse on a broader spectrum of skin colours and ages than we realised (or than I did), and US juries fail to convict guilty officers. You don’t have to be black: you just need to be off-white.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. After all, when Sureshbhai Patel – an Indian grandfather, 57 at the time, having arrived in the land of promise just a week before to help look after his grandson – stepped outside on his morning stroll in Huntsville, Alabama, on the street where he lived on the 6th February this year, he was described as “black” by the 911 caller who summoned his white assailant.

Patel was, of course, acting suspiciously when this diligent resident rang him in: not only was he potentially black, but he was walking, along the street. Far worse, the caller reported: he was doing it yesterday and today – a sort of serial walker. We can all picture and share the caller’s concern. It’s also very easy to imagine, in the rapid panicked flicker of emergency events – the way eye-witnesses overestimate speed – that you might confuse brown with black. And let’s not forget, the man was walking – he wouldn’t even keep still for his colour to be properly identified.

Because this is an article attacking prejudice, there shall be no paragraph here about gas guzzlers, obesity, or America’s unique philosophy of personal transportation.

Several reports have mentioned that Patel had no English, which is more or less true. But actually, not quite, because he asserts that he did manage to issue the words “my house, my house” and “148, 148”.

This stationary, innocent resident was then folded to the ground by officer Eric Parker in a slam which partially paralysed him. He and his severely injured neck were subsequently lifted carelessly back to their limp immobilised feet as an officer told him more than once, “You can walk”, then slowly realised his statement was false. Presumably the officers had been given no first aid training, or not for people of colour.

Robert Tuten, Parker’s defense attorney, said at the start of the most recent trial:

When you come to the US we expect you to follow our laws and speak our language. Mr Patel bears as much responsibility for this as anyone.

With Patel on the ground, one officer can clearly be heard saying, “I don’t know what his problem is, but he won’t listen” – this is despite Patel having indicated to the officers at an early stage that his problem, when it came to “listening” to them, was that he didn’t speak or understand English. It was, therefore, officer Parker who had not listened.

No paragraph here about Americans abroad (like Brits abroad) who expect to be able to colonise other territories with their English, on holiday and even in residency, but whose governments would nonetheless expect those territories’ security forces to respect their citizens’ human rights.

And in any case, Patel did manage some English, probably not an easy feat under what may have felt like real panic. (Patel may be more courageous than me, but I’d have felt pretty stressed in his position when the officers accosted him.) Patel indicated that he lived at number 148. He was allowed to be in this street – he lived in it. And perhaps he was even allowed to walk along that street, under American law – perhaps he still hadn’t chosen his gas guzzler after his first week there. It was a nice day, as well.

Non-Americans: let us not become anti-American (that is, set ourselves immovably against its people, or against its white ones). If we do, we are no better than the next bigot or racist. America is full of tolerant, talented people, of all colours and identities. It’s an immigrant nation. The main problem seems to reside in certain powerful American institutions, in this case its police force. We should continue to name the fault we find with one of the world’s most powerful countries calling itself a democracy, but we cannot hold all its people accountable for them.

But white Americans: if you want your country to be taken seriously as a modern democracy, then you should all be as vocal as any minority about the blatant police mistreatment of minorities in your country. Many of you already are, and this is a credit to America’s humanity; but there remain real – and really frightening – red streaks in white American society.

Should we have loathed all white South Africans during apartheid? And should democracies around the world have done things to indicate to South Africa that apartheid wasn’t alright?

No, I would never compare modern American police violence against minorities to South African apartheid, that would be stupid, ludicrous. That would be like calling an Indian black.

Oh, and, twice an American jury has now failed to convict officer Parker. Can we hope it will be third time lucky?

The 5 best ways to write badly

Good writers often agree there’s no formula for good writing. But bad writing is different – if you want to put your reader to sleep, or make them laugh in all the wrong places (and at you, not with you), there are many formulae. Here are five, any one of which should do the trick.

1. Use clichés instead of thinking for yourself (so original I put it first)

She has sweet blue eyes which dazzle me like a bright summer sky.

Clichés, unless used carefully, zap life and meaning out of writing. They’ve been heard before, and bounce off readers’ brains like water off a submarine. They don’t tell your reader anything about your scene, drama, narrative – the emotion or point you want to convey.

Remember that you, the writer, already feel the force of the thing to be conveyed, and may easily succumb to the seduction of weak clichés. Your reader does not, and needs you to map them out a new way to get where you’re telling them to go.

But clichés can feel creepily omnipresent in the ways we all say things. They can feel to language like capitalism to economies. It’s hard work, really avoiding them.

You can use your imagination to find fresh, original concrete imagery which says what you need it to, and ground your reader’s emotions in simple details which you must invent.

Or, you can start using a cliché, then turn it on its head or knock it off its clichéd pedestal, perhaps comically. In other words, deliberately lower the tone.

She has lovely blue eyes and incredible tits.

2. Shaft yourself with innuendoes and other unfortunate meanings

Dick really got stuck in, and the teamwork seemed to lubricate the atmosphere.

Think that writing is just the sum of the author’s intentions? Here’s one spectacular proof that it’s not: writers spectacularly miss innuendoes – after spectacularly writing them. But those innuendoes are there, oh yes, they’re there, in the text, and in the reader’s brain.

I always think the modern mind rather seeks out dirty meanings as well; if I’m wrong, then humans have always been like that.

From ‘the sudden warm wind from the south’ to ‘that loving way he had of poking her in the morning’, writers need to be on their guard against unintended readings.

At my old job they put posters in the toilets which read, ‘Did you nearly have an accident?’ This is bad writing, and bad health and safety – both taken to literal-minded extremes.

But unintended readings can get much more subtle – my English teacher pointed out years ago that even a Fish and Chip shop advertising itself in quotes can arouse suspicion:

“Fish and Chips”

(“What are they really selling?”)

3. Turn even the most exciting events into a boring list, by writing them out as a boring list

By now I was a respected test pilot, finishing my PhD at the same time. By the following summer, I just knew I had to be an astronaut. NASA eventually accepted me, and there followed several years of unbelievably hard work. It’s flown by though – literally! Now I’m in space, and it’s amazing.

Feel inspired? I don’t. Except maybe to look for work as a ghost astronaut writer.

Even if you want to summarise years in a few short sentences, and even if what you write has to resemble a list, you could make it a more interesting list.

As a test pilot, I tasted the edges of our atmosphere and I saw the darkness of space, all the while turning in long nights on Earth’s surface to finish my PhD. I was beginning to realise that I had to get out there into space, like those astronauts of my childhood dreams…

4. Fail to use punctuation correctly, while misusing it at every possible opportunity

At which point; Steve the protagonists friend – decides, to help his friend out.

Learn the rules and norms of punctuation in your language, and make frequent use of them. They are not to be guessed or intuited from speech. And this is no more the place for your writer’s creativity to flap its wings than your font size.

5. Misuse the word ‘literally’, or misuse any word

We literally couldn’t believe our eyes.

For the seemingly few people left who still cling to hope that this rather useful word might survive a bit longer in English – and not just as a means of adding emphasis – it is annoying that even when people consciously, carefully, try to use the word ‘literally’ correctly they fail.

Things are seldom literally true – because language is so full of metaphor – which was what made this word so useful, for distinguishing when they really were. ‘Literally’ does not just mean ‘really’ or ‘absolutely’. I could literally go on forever about this.

As a writer you can lead the way, by using words with their real meanings in mind – and of course this goes for all words. Otherwise, you’ll truly look stupid.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ (bandrat)

Oh yeah, climate change…

Climate change is flying dangerously close to the gravity of asteroids: world-ending, yes, potentially, at some point, maybe, yes, I’ve heard of that; completely beyond our control of course.

Aside from ‘climate deniers’, I think we now face a new generation of quiet climate suicidalists – people often my age or more who aren’t going to live to see anything that drastic themselves, and have been privately letting go of bothering with that particular concern.

As the favourite climate denier’s saying goes, I’m not a scientist, but… This honest opening, or opening honesty, has been used against such sceptics to undermine them and anything they might say after the ‘but’, but I disagree with this particular attack – there are enough others to choose from. And everyone should be worried – climate scientists are simply the most worried.

Because I’m not a scientist, I will make few scientific claims, avoiding risking setting the cause back seventeen years. The point of this post is to examine how we think.

So to get the boring undoubted science bit over with quickly, as sure as we are that the Earth tilts on its axis, Earth’s ice is melting at rates unprecedented in its current natural cycles. The hope that rising global temperatures might have been the sun’s fault no longer holds ice. Fred Pearce explains this clearly in this article on NewScientist.com:

The 2007 IPCC report halved the maximum likely influence of solar forcing on warming over the past 250 years from 40% to 20%. This was based on a reanalysis of the likely changes in solar forcing since the 17th century.

But even if solar forcing in the past was more important than this estimate suggests, as some scientists think, there is no correlation between solar activity and the strong warming during the past 40 years.

Expanding industrialised humans cause higher global temperatures, which means less ice. Climate science is absurdly complicated, but this consequence is flowing out its seemingly logical course.

And when ice melts, it leaves greater surfaces of dark sea which can gobble yet more heat from the sun which the great white ancient ice sheets used to smile back, creating a potentially runaway effect.

More sea means less dry land for things like us to live on! And of course, what we’re doing to the ice and seas are just the tip of the shite-berg of disruptions we’re provoking, already looming massive underneath the waves.

Alright, we get it – we’re shit and we’re all to blame, just by being alive and farting in the modern developed world, a world whose shit is flying unnervingly close to a giant fan. But we were each built to fart and didn’t choose to be built – how are we guilty?

Climate change has problems, as problems go.

It is too monstrous to confront – there isn’t the energy in each individual human brain to keep facing and prioritising it. It’s not direct enough, as threats go: a swerving upwards of long-term statistics; an increase in the worst things that already sometimes made the news; a higher likelihood of more bad weather events over less time, to be suffered largely by others, the worst of it in the future. These are dangerously abstract threats.

Climate change doesn’t touch most of our everyday lives yet in obvious ways, and there’s no date for our asteroid strike. Our health and finances and economies therefore seem far more important, here, now – though none of them could exist without a habitable climate.

It can also feel too late – we’re approaching tipping points, just as the developing world gives lift-off to its own industrial revolution. Why should we try?

And I suppose it’s like this: it might look unlikely that human civilisation can survive much longer in anything like its current form – if aliens light-years from here are placing bets in a thousand years, few will put real money on us muddling our belated human way through this. And perhaps they’ll have seen it all before in other telescopes pointed different ways.

But we who are down here in this year had better hope with damnings and profanities loudly jingling from our hopes that we do. In this cosmic chance that has swirled itself into what we call our world and somehow swept us out of stardust into life here, there is no excuse for complacency over enormous imminent risks to our survival.

Perhaps our problem is our individual creativity. We’re not like loyal cells in an organism. We can think of so many stances to take to protect our own personal sanity for the short time we’re alive, instead of dealing with a given problem we are part of – rather like politicians suddenly in power, clutching the minimal shell of reputation needed to hold onto that power for a term in office, not changing anything.

You can put the issue to the back of your mind; you can deny it to yourself, or do so publically; feel really guilty about it but, observing that it is probably too late and not really your problem, do precisely nothing – just enjoy the odd apocalyptic film to persuade yourself you’re in touch with these things. And there are more and more of these stances poised like actors in the dark wings of our brains.

I have a suggestion for a new one: a thought experiment to be recalled whenever necessary. Picture, two centuries from now, a flourishing future human civilisation which has narrowly escaped the most severe threats to its way of life from climate change, and which has done this in sustainable ways, not by putting thousands of mirrors into space to wink the sun’s heat back at it at just the right rate and hoping all the mirrors don’t crash into one another.

Our great[*5] grandchildren, the best climate geeks of the day, are standing around saying “Phew!” as they grin at what we would call screens in our confusion. They rejoice – as 3D projections chart values across robot-dusted floors for gasses and dusts and particles and temperatures across years – that this was finally taken more seriously in the early 21st century. If our ancestors had carried on the way they were going until just 2050, the scientists and historians realise in horror, tipping points could have tipped humans into undocumented history. Thank hell they started getting serious in twenty fifteen.

And this is now roughly the best scenario we are leaving behind, no, in front of us. We start reversing this now, or we should know that we may well be laying out a wasteland for our children to inherit, a world we would be furious to have been born into, a vacuum of a world, flooded and sucked dry with storms, littered with our charred incomprehensible excesses.

So if you are a human, make it your absolute aim and intention that this should work out. Behave as though you were making sure that this wasn’t going to be allowed to keep getting worse. Picture those future scientists and historians, and all those future people. They are glad that we righted our skewed perspective on sacrifice and risk, just in time.

We can all start, at the very least, by targeting our waste. Sir David Attenborough has been pointing out for years that large parts of our carbon output are pure waste – no aspect of lifestyle quality being paid for or gained. Think of electrical items on standby for thousands of hours per year, wifi networks busy through the night when we’re asleep or away.

Someone who desperately needed to save money might turn off their wifi while cooking or reading a book, and might notice later that they hadn’t really lost anything. We can target our waste above all, and also adjust our definition of waste, and our definition of what we ‘need’. Do we really need to be connected to the internet all the time? Our wifi box produces enough heat to attract our cats. Yes, I know, cats cost carbon. But they’re not a waste.

The time for calling this a threat to our future has passed. For now, most of us can still hide from climate change, but for some it is already wreaking death and homelessness.

Soon my first child will be born, although I already cared the same about life on this world, the only world we have – about my four nieces and the seemingly distant horizons of future they will see to, about my friends and their children, and about the animals. As we increasingly exchange ideas and cultures, we are also each other’s descendants, briefly inheriting and influencing this same small planet, the same line of humans that came frightened and determined out of Africa.

There are now young children who are outraged to learn about all of this, rightly. Time is moving swiftly on, and soon it will be 2100, the year of so many of our vague distant threats. Large numbers of people alive today can hope to see that year in.

Not guilt though. We just need to form new habits. Maybe some dread. But you can make it a useful dread – dread at what you’d tell your children if you hadn’t started doing more about this. The kind of dread that is easily overcome, that fuels the doing of small things, and even leaves behind a kind of satisfaction.

“I hate Muslims”, and other meaningless statements

Incidentally, I’m an atheist, or agnostic. I believe there’s ultimately no real way of knowing, stuck in this existence, whether there’s a god or not, or lots of gods, or whether if there are they made this world; or whether he or she or they or it take the forms people think they do. I doubt it, and I am not a natural defender of religion. But this article really has nothing to do with religion – it’s to do with something much simpler. And the more you think you hate or dislike Muslims, the more you should read this.

Casual Islamophobia seems to have been creeping up on us lately, sometimes even on people who are usually open-minded. It is so easily smuggled through with an attack on terrorism, and the two nestle safely together. We fear the Islamification of Europe much more than we care about helping people trying to flee war, exactly as we’d do in their situation. Ben Carson, a potential future president of the United States, declared recently that he wouldn’t want a Muslim in charge of their country – while a rival, perhaps trying to trump his own astounding record in prejudice, fails to query or quieten a man announcing loudly that “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims.” From the footage I’ve watched, nobody booed the man either, although there was laughter and a gentle ripple of grinning through the audience – you can only hope in embarrassed pity – as well as at least one firmly shaking head. Thank you, the white man with the beard and glasses somewhere behind Trump.

Let’s assume that 23% of the world’s population identifies as ‘Muslim’ (covering, of course, a broad range of nationalities, sects, religious practices, professions and lifestyles). This estimate was published in 2011 by Pew Research Centre. If you hate Muslims, you therefore hate 1.6 billion people on this planet – aside from those you have some reason to dislike. In Europe alone, you despise and mistrust over 43 million human beings – by default, in advance, without knowing anything about them except a relatively arbitrary cultural identifier (arbitrary because it does not define or predict a person’s character or their behaviour in general, and so much of the culture we each inherit is also down to chance – geographical chance for instance).

This is a reminder that language makes it possible to say meaningless things. I can assert, using the widely trusted English language, without offending its syntax, that “Loathsome toads drop cherries on Tuesdays”, or that “Republicans who live in the zoo are happy”. I can say these things or write them, but that doesn’t mean that these statements mean anything, i.e., correspond to anything that actually exists, or could exist, or which there is some context for. A meaningless statement is beyond false.

I could also assert that I hate all people called Andy. The real proof that this statement does not actually mean anything resides in the fact that I will encounter people called Andy without knowing that’s their name – in shops, hospitals, pubs, aeroplanes. Yet the meaning of hatred is connected with, and requires knowledge of, the characteristics of whatever is to be hated – for hate to mean something, it must hate something, knowingly, because of an intense dislike of how it finds it.

Someone called Andy could hold open a door for me or give me life-saving surgery and I could thank him and smile, breaching my claim: it isn’t actually possible to live, in practice, hating everyone called Andy. (And remember, not all Muslims have beards or dark skin or cover their faces, so the same applies.)

Even if you asked everyone you met if they were a Muslim or called Andy so you knew whether to hate them or not, you’d have to admit to yourself that hating them all didn’t actually amount to any kind of sense: it would be a meaningless hatred, not even really hatred. Among all the people you met named Andy, you’d inevitably find, statistically, virtually the same range of personal characteristics that you found in a random sample of the male population of the same size.

Language can only point to meaning where there is something that can be meant. And a meaningless statement of hatred, if you try to believe it and drag it through your life, will burden you and fuel an irritation in you that you cannot actually live by it – there is always more hating left to be done, to be perpetually reinvented and justified.

Ok, so you think that ‘Andy’ is not a fair analogy – after all, Andy is not constantly popping up on the news because he blew himself to smithereens in a crowded public place. You don’t read in the paper that a set of radical Andies have beheaded everyone again in some innocent village, or bulldozed world-precious ancient monuments or hijacked a fresh set of planes. Of course Andy is not the problem, stupid.

The reason that the analogy should make you think is this: without attempting the crude exercise of putting a number to this, a rational informed person can know that the percentage of people who call themselves Muslims worldwide perpetrating violent terrorist acts, or planning or pining to do so, is infinitesimally small. Of the 43 million reported to be living in Europe, for example, how many are plotting to blow up others? And how many are living in harmony in Western societies, Christian and secular ones, working hard in all the same jobs as everyone else, bringing up and educating and loving their children, befriending non-Muslim neighbours? A Muslim born and living in Britain today may have much more in common as a person with their agnostic British contemporary than they do with another Muslim growing up in Afghanistan immersed in different culture, and this is an accentuated example of what applies more widely – your religion nowhere near defines you.

If you’re a Christian or, like me, just white, imagine how you’d feel if people routinely went around saying they mistrusted or hated whites and Christians, because of the tiny fractional factions of white supremacists and Christian nutters (often the same culprits, of course) who perpetrate hatred in their tiny pockets of poisoned air around the world? You’d think this was unfair and absurd, and you would feel at best alienated from whoever was casually merging you with these people.

Arguably of course, all extremism which claims a religious inspiration is in fact an affront to that religion and its ‘real’ followers, not a legitimate participant in it: I am glad when I hear people refer to the ‘so-called Islamic State’. They do not deserve to carry the name they have seized, as all life-loving Muslims know.

In the Koran it says this: Take not life, which Allah hath made sacred, except by way of justice and law… (al-An’am 6:151). You can cite what look like violent quotes too, but you can have exactly the same tat-for-tit exchange over large parts of the Old Testament. To pursue a rational attack on violent religious scripture, you would direct identical criticism at Christian and Jewish scripture.

The fact is, religions have gone through many forms historically, and are not the sole cause of human stupidity and violence, even when they are given as its name. I think the fact that such a spectrum of worthy and heinous things can be done (supposedly) in the name of religion, from Martin Luther King to the so-called IS, proves that religion is not the only driver in human conflict and intolerance, nor in our good: religion can, at least nominally, inspire atrocities, and miracles of compassion and courage – and it seems that humans can inspire themselves to both these extremes without religion.

Modern religious believers overwhelmingly advocate peace and tolerance, and find inspiration and comfort from their beliefs and scripture. They want to live their modern lives, which, happily, lack violence and war and tribalism compared to older human ways of life.

There is, of course, a perfectly rational dislike for sharia law, and the grotesque repression of women; but the dislike for these medieval phenomena, and others, should be targeted where those phenomena are actually at work and inflicting their misery. These phenomena amount to the imposition of Islam on potentially unwilling participants and societies, not the pursuit of Islam as one’s own religion. A generalised Islamophobia is like blaming every Western citizen for all the least ingenious things that Bush and Blair decided were a good idea at the time. Or blaming all Jews for all the problems in Germany in the 1930s.

Also, could we find a way (if this didn’t cause too much expense and disruption in civil service departments around the world) to stop glorifying what we all loathe and stand against – heinous terrorism – with such attractive names? ‘Radical’ has exciting revolutionary connotations, especially when there is perceived to be an evil authority to stand up against! Most of us would agree that we value certain things in life ‘fundamentally’, yet we call our worst enemies fundamentalists.

We know that Western foreign policy has wreaked death on innocent Muslims in recent years and has (at best sometimes) been a catastrophic waste and mismanagement of life – think of Paul Bremer put in charge in Iraq in 2003 – and that’s why we now have to tiptoe so carefully round possible wars and do everything possible to fight them only at arm’s length, or pay and wait for others to fight them for us.

The variable of a grievance is fed all the more easily into the equation of the one who feels ‘radical’ – justified, righteous, standing for good in the face of something bad. We must stop persuading ourselves that extremism just emerges and thrives without our help.

Donald Trump went to pains to clarify that he does not tar Muslims all with the same brush, simply by passively agreeing that there is a problem with Muslims in the US, or not actively contradicting this idea. Pressed in interviews afterwards, he made light of the whole thing, clarified that he believes there is a problem with some Muslims, and revealed that he even has some Muslim friends, some living in the States. I’d be interested to know what some of them think.

I live in Spain, so I’m a foreigner by way of nationality. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I knew that the English were unwelcome here, by definition in advance, simply because of something stupid their government (a tiny percentage of them) had done. I’m grateful that the reverse is the case – that I have felt welcomed in Spain, even after people find out that my name is Andy. No-one has assumed that I’ll be stuck up and rude and believe myself to be in a British colony and get horrifically drunk and be sick on them, or that everything I say must be falsified with ludicrously stiffened manners.

And while we’re on the subject, or while I finish with it, I’m sick of the obsession with Muhammad cartoons, with whole events and soirées being devoted to this vengeful cause. Fine, if there’s some particular context for one, which there has been in Paris this year, then freedom of speech and expression should assert itself and not be repressed by traditional barriers that we no longer acknowledge in Western cultures. But think of something else now. There’s freedom of speech, and there’s unimaginative abuse of that freedom – angry harsh incessant childish screaming. Remember that you’re screaming in the face of something of fundamental importance to hundreds of millions of peace-loving people living on this planet, very near to you – a certain percentage of doctors, bus drivers, scientists, neighbours, actors and sports stars (no-one minds Muslims on TV). Sixteen hundred million people written in the same genetic code as you – and me.

The next time you say (or think you’re going to) that you don’t like Muslims, consider, really, that this might be nonsense. Non, sense. In other words, consider again.

Image: Shaeekh Shuvro https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muslims_praying_in_a_Masque_in_Bangladesh.jpg?uselang=en-gb