Michael Marshall's Blog, page 2

Let's Deconstruct A Meme, Kids!

Ten minutes on Twitter — if one wanders cautiously outside the elitist libtard echo-chamber that is my natural home — demonstrates that one of the alt-right’s very favorite things is the creation of memes, especially ones targeting the Democratic candidate for president.

Here’s a recent favorite:

The allegation being that, while working as a staff attorney on the Watergate Investigation, Hillary was fired for unethical behaviour, thus “proving” forty years of corruption, concerted attempts to destroy the United States and its constitution, and general evil naughtiness. 

In fact, two seconds on Google will show the assertion is nonsense, and that Clinton remained on the Watergate Committee until Richard Nixon resigned and the Committee’s business was concluded. Here’s just two take-downs, from leading (and politically neutral) urban myth sites — Snopes and UrbanMyths.

So what does this meme actually demonstrate? That Clinton has been subject to counter-factual right-wing smears for decades, of course — but something more important, too. It illustrates that she has been working as a public servant, at the heart of American politics, for over forty years. The emails that the alt-right go on and on and on and on about actually show the same thing: a dedicated, compassionate professional doing her job, day after day. No, of course she isn't perfect. Do you know anybody who is? Especially a politician, particularly one who's spent decades making judgement calls? But also — have you seen the choice? (And don’t start bleating to me about “Dr” Jill Stein. She’s a clueless dilettante.)

Trump, of course, has never held elected office, nor spent a moment of his gilded life working for the good of the people, in any role. As a matter of interest, what was he doing in 1975, you may ask, when Clinton was on the Watergate Investigation? Well, in 1973 the Department of Justice sued Trump Management for a concerted policy of discrimination against African Americans in buildings they owned — a practice that included attaching a piece of paper to applications with the letter C for “colored” on it. In 1975, Trump and his father were finally compelled to sign an agreement with plans to desegregate their properties. You’ll be unsurprised to hear this was not discussed during his outreach spectacle in Detroit on Saturday night. 

Within this meme, therefore, is interesting truth — but the opposite of that claimed by people who hate Hillary with a pathological fury that’s hard to comprehend, and borders on disturbing (have a brief look at the #SickHillary tag on Twitter, to see how luridly obsessed these people are). The Internet is creaking under the weight of this bullshit, gleefully brandished and recycled by people who — despite the insight they feel they have on politics — deploy grammar that makes my eyes bleed (and yes, I know I keep going on about this like some dreary elitist bore, but if you can’t learn the simple rules of apostrophe use then I’ll be damned if I’ll take your word on the complex issues of international political praxis. Or even the best place to buy a breakfast burrito).

This election has become rabidly personal in a way none has ever been before. Even major news agencies are conducting their coverage with a degree of relish for the ad hominem that is shoving all issues of substance into deep background — and it's hard to avoid, when Trump's entire campaign strategy rests on attaching a pejorative adjective to the name of every opponent. The process is not bringing out the best in anyone. I am, for example, intrigued by the — curiously generally undiscussed — suggestion that Trump may be required in October to attend a pretrial conference in the matter of Doe vs. Trump et all, for a Personal Injury - Assault, Libel, & Slander suit. But I know that I have to fight against a predisposition to believe that Trump has a case to answer here (you can do your own research to find out what this case is (allegedly) about — I don’t have sufficient proof it's real, and we libtards tend to like a bit more evidence before we head to the meme-generator) on the basis not even of a distrust of the man himself, but a fervent dislike of his swivel-eyed fans, and the people out there monetizing their discontent.

The truth is that Clinton and Trump are barely important any more. They (and Bernie, and that dreadful wanker Milo Yiannopoulos, and others) are merely talismans on the tattered flags brandished by sides at war, images of conflicting ideas of what the country — and by extension, the world — should stand for. Perhaps it’s always been that way. But this time it's worse, and the Internet really isn't helping. Social media is becoming increasingly allopathic, continually smashing opposites against each other, crushing reality to dust in the process. That's not taking us anywhere good — and I choose to believe we're far better than this. That there is no wall that we cannot climb over, or knock down... and the most powerful direction of attack is always through a centre line. In the meantime, let's stop dignifying the alt-right with the idea that it's a political position. It's not. It's a psychological condition, born of fear and ignorance, and nurtured on a diet of lies. 

On a slightly related note, today represents the fiftieth anniversary of my family first coming to live in the United States, when I was one year old. I am very grateful that this country allowed the huddled mass of the Smith family to settle here: though we were, of course, white and ideologically suitable, which always makes it easier. I know that my mother — an old school feminist, and also involved in the movement to unionize black domestic workers in Florida, a non-trivial enterprise in the South during the late 1960s — would be shocked by how this election demonstrates that issues of race, sexism and homophobia remain front-line battles to be fought on a day-to-day basis. But they are wars that must be won. And they will, eventually. Not through memes, but through hope, patience, and a willingness to walk a long, long road.

Happy Labor Day. Now, let's grill. 

Stop shouting. Come closer.

As always, I'm posting mainly to get something out of my system. I don't expect anyone to give a damn. But I keep hearing people at the moment saying that “democracy” is failing us. It’s not. Democracy is an abstract noun. We made it up. It’s not failing us. We’re failing it. 

We’re failing it whenever we vote on the basis of misinformation and lies, and reject “experts” (when exactly did that become a term of abuse?) or “elitist intellectuals” who suggest it might be a good idea to understand the issues. We’re failing it when we throw our vote away in protests nobody will ever know or care about, and may bring about the opposite of what we want. We’re failing it when we use narrow referendum victories to validate racism, but also when we allow narrow referendum losses to dismiss every person who disagrees with us as a fascist. We’re failing it when we wank on about “revolutions” that will never happen and which the vast majority do not want (having spent sufficient time on the planet to have noticed how badly revolutions tend to work out for all concerned), but also when we ignore the frustrations of people on both right and left, young and old, who feel alienated and ignored by the political system. We’re failing it when we set up straw men adversaries and waste all our energy trying to set them on fire, taking offense at anything that does not conform with our definition of acceptability. We’re failing it when we spend our lives in online echo chambers, never attempting to positively engage with people living in the opposing chambers, instead becoming self-radicalized niche-fundamentalists. 

As a parent you find yourself being addressed from afar a lot of the time. Children take a while to understand that “I can’t hear you” doesn’t mean “shout louder”, but “come closer”. But we all seem to have trouble understanding this, because the same applies to political discourse. 

Nobody is right all the time. That’s why we have democracy, to average out all our wrongnesses into something that hopefully approximates the political mood at any given moment. That snapshot may provide a map for the road ahead, but equally it will confront us with ourselves, our present angers and confusions — and there may be periods when it’s more important to acknowledge and engage with those uneasy revelations than it is to believe voting gave us an “answer”. It will suggest to us that rather than obsessing about our abstract nouns, we should be focussing on proper nouns, the real people with whom we share our societies and countries. 

Failing democracy isn’t good. But failing the real people around us, those who need our tolerance and understanding — and that includes everyone, all the time, even if they're small-minded xenophobic assholes — that’s a crime. Every time we dismiss someone solely on the basis of their religion, race, sexual orientation or politics, we’re failing democracy and ourselves. And every time we care less about someone for those reasons, we're failing humanity too. We might get further with the war on terror, for example, if we appeared to give more of a shit when Muslims get slaughtered. Over a hundred and fifty people — including many children — died in Baghdad yesterday, on Ramadan, in a single attack. That's a lot. I didn't change my avatar to reflect this — did you? No. None of us did. It didn't get a hashtag. It didn't even trend. This morning, Chris Evans bailing from Top Gear is trending instead. That's insane. 

Nobody is perfect. It’s not just middle-aged het white guys who are capable of being offensively dumb. There are infuriating Muslims, Jews, women, African-Americans and LGBTQs and young people too. Some of the most virulent alt-right Twitters are women, including the appalling @AnnCoulter (and yes I'm aware how many of the other accounts are feeble men hiding behind personas): plus there's this guy — @Nero. Failing to acknowledge the diversity of wrongness risks reducing any group to a concept, the fate that befell the Native Americans. Once they’d been elevated to the status of noble savages dripping with ancient wisdom it became okay to steal their land, because abstract nouns don’t need homes. It should go without saying that the groups listed above have spent more than enough time being grievously mistreated and discriminated against to be owed special consideration now. But we can’t make all our decisions based on the fact that we’re male or female or conservative or Muslim or black or love guns or straight or Christian or leftist or poor or rich or intellectual or an over-privileged white, male, heterosexual living in the Bay area (that would be me). As soon as you can never be in error, you stop being real — and you stop contributing anything useful to any debate, ever. 

Because just as everybody is sometimes wrong, everybody is sometimes right — even if it’s only about their particular situation, and needs, and fears. Yes, even that Trump supporter racist homophobic craphead in line in front of you in Safeway, recycling counterfactual Fox News bullshit so loudly and obnoxiously that after a while you start to wish you were in favor of guns after all. He or she may know nothing about the things you care about, but they know about themselves — and they get to vote too. The world — and social media is increasingly implicated in this — is steadily driving us deeper into niches. We’re getting further and further apart, and shouting even louder as a consequence. 

Countries will always be run by political elites. To believe otherwise is naive. But our towns and streets can be different, and that’s where we live. We need to stop only talking to the people on the same side, and take the risk of trying to engage in calm, polite, worthwhile discussion with those we don’t agree with. It’s extremely unlikely anybody will change their mind as a result — people almost never do — but we would all be far better informed when the time comes to vote. Voting with your heart is not enough. Your mind needs to be involved, and your conscience too. True democracy requires soul. 

Don't get me wrong. Personally I despise a lot of these people, and despair of them, and a few clicks on Twitter will introduce you to a cesspool of misogynist, antisemitic, homophobic racist vileness that beggars belief. There's no helping those assholes. They are lost to the debate and thus also, in a sense, to humanity. But there are reasonable people on all sides, and we have to talk. That’s real, grass-roots democracy, the only type which most of us have any chance of influencing, and the kind that could actually make a difference to the lives of the proper nouns we all are. 

 

Meanwhile I’m off to England for a month, which should be... interesting. Apparently some events have occurred there recently. Look after California while I’m gone, okay? Don’t let it do anything weird.

Stop making excuses for racist stupidity

I know this will lose me some friends, but I’m now getting very, very bored of compassionate, intellectual people on both left and right patiently explaining to me that what happened in Britain — and what could happen in America in November — isn’t the fault of thick, small-minded xenophobes, and the poor little things were misled and confused by a naughty elite. This is just a more subtle form of patronizing elitism. 

Let the thick, small-minded xenophobes own their dreadful victory, even if many of them appear too thick to have realized the whole thing wasn’t a drill, or an opportunity to give a bloody nose to the same right-wing assholes THEY ELECTED. Respect their agency, and its deeply unpleasant reality. Stop thinking the “intellectuals” covertly control everything, because we really, really don’t. The stupidity is real. 

Read the comments in the Daily Mail or Sun or on Twitter. Watch the wankers in the streets of England now jeering at people who've spent their whole lives there saying “Ha — time to go back where you come from”. Ignorance is no defence in law, and it’s not in politics either, and we do not have to respect or excuse or second-guess the views and actions of people too stupid to work out how to sit on a toilet, never mind influence a country’s future. 

Look at this asshole. No elite made him wear that. HE DID IT ALL BY HIMSELF.

Binaries for Beginners

I should be working but I’m too depressed, furious, embarrassed and hungover, so instead I thought I’d provide a handy explanation of the concept of binary decisions for all the people on the right and left who clearly don’t understand them. 

Amongst the things that are most making me want to lie down on the carpet and weep this morning is the muppet parade of Brexit voters who seem to be a bit bewildered at what they’ve done, who are terribly confused to discover that voting Leave has led to Britain actually leaving the EU — at appalling long-term financial, cultural and societal cost. They apparently thought they were “showing the establishment”. They thought they were casting a “protest vote”. 

No, you morons — it was a binary. It was In, or Out. Did you not get that? Who did you think would register or admire your protest? The vote was anonymous. Nobody knew how you voted until you bragged to your friends about it. There was no “One In The Eye For The Establishment” box to tick. The choice was In, or Out? How was this hard to understand?

Democracy is not there for you to “have your say” or “show Them”. You can do that if you live in a village of thirty people. With countries of tens or hundreds of millions of voters, the process has to be streamlined. The system therefore provides people with a clear and simple choice. All it asks is that you have the wit to understand that. Which apparently was too big an ask. 

Late last night, fueled by a certain amount of beer and the common Twitter-led delusion that people do — or should — give a crap what I think, I said:

This is a wake-up call, America. There are more tiny-minded xenophobe bigots out there than you think. Get behind Hillary NOW.

The interesting thing is that nobody from the right has come back at me for it. People from the left have, though. One scolded me for being mean to the small-minded and xenophobic. Several lectured me on how evil Hillary is. 

You know what? I sympathize if you’re not entirely happy with either candidate, but nobody fucking cares about your nuanced and virtue-signaling parade of adolescent musings about big banks and corporate politics and how we need a revolution because that would be totally cool. Get over yourself and how awfully individual and interesting you are, and wrap your mind around the fact that the upcoming election is a binary too. If you don’t vote for Hillary, you are effectively voting for Trump. How hard can that be to understand? There’s NO-ONE ELSE. Bernie lost. Neither the Greens nor an independent nor Angie’s Freethinking Groovy Revolution Collective are going to be running the country next year. Do you understand? 

It’s Clinton or Trump. There are not nine options. IT’S A BINARY. 

I am firmly of the left, and always will be. But right now the left is pissing me off almost as much as the right is scaring me. Politics is not about you. It’s about us. All of us. Stop wasting everybody’s time with your sophomoric “look at how sophisticated and edgy my views are” bullshit and get ready to make a very simple choice — because the moderates of the world, the League of Empathetic Sane People, and hundreds of millions of humans of all races, creeds, genders and demographic status, are sick and tired of having their countries and lives and futures fucked up by extremists at either end of the spectrum.

The Song of Being European #remain

There seem to be a lot of people still tying themselves into extreme pretzels trying to work out whether to remain in the EU, or leave. Because I am infinitely wise I thought I’d boil down the whole complex issue for you, using as an exemplar the life of the AC/DC rhythm guitarist, Malcolm Young.  

1. Complex harmony

Many factors have led to AC/DC continuing to be stadium favorites after nearly forty years. The explosive six-string pyrotechnics of Angus Young, of course; songs compelling enough to make BACK IN BLACK one of the ten best-selling albums of all time; the tightest rhythm section in history, especially in the gold standard Young/Rudd/Williams configuration; and a crunching, dependable juggernaut of a live show. But the real magic comes from the interplay between Angus and Malcolm’s guitar work. If you listen carefully it's a lot more subtle than power chords being thudded out in 4/4 time. The sly, prowling rhythms are distinctive, of course — but in addition, they’re sharing the notes. Rather than follow the standard practice of having one guy thump the chords out and the other put something fancy on top, Angus and Malcolm distribute the individual notes of all of the chords between them, and then syncopate the result — yielding a richness of texture that no other rock band has ever equalled. 

That’s what being part of a union of countries, is, too. Sharing and distributing the job, the style, the song of being European — each country contributing its cultural qualities and helping build something that’s far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s hard. It requires work and vision, and there will be some bum notes. But retreat from this mature collaboration of equals and you’re just some kid playing Stairway to Devon by yourself in your bedroom. 

2. Step up and face the challenges

The last time I saw AC/DC was at Wembley in 2009. It’ll be last time I see them live, partly because the experience showed that I am now too old and fragile to spend an evening in the mosh pit of a major stadium gig (it’s like having the crap beaten out of you for six hours); also because it was Malcolm’s last UK performance. Nobody but the band knew at that stage that he’d been exhibiting signs of early-onset dementia. By this point in the Rock and Roll Train tour it’d gotten to the point where he was forgetting the chord sequences of hits he’d been playing for thirty years, and having to relearn them in the afternoon before each performance. 

Just try to wrap your head around that for a moment. How it must make you feel, to confront that level of frailty within yourself, to have no choice but to acknowledge the cold winds of oncoming mortality. And then to do what it takes to overcome it, and walk out on stage in front of sixty thousand people and do your job like a fucking boss. 

Being a country is hard. Dealing with other countries is hard, putting aside national priorities for the sake of a greater good takes character, and helping find solutions to problems like immigration is part of the job of being a mature country. Malc has now retired from the band — because half the time he doesn’t know who he is any more. Britain should know who it is, and be confident of manifesting its qualities on a European stage instead of hiding in a safe, stuffy cupboard like an insecure, bolshy child. 

Britain — be like Malcolm: stand at the back, not demanding the spotlight, and dig in and work in the face of challenge and adversity. Don’t run away like some whining, racist, small-minded Daily Mail-reading cess-pool of lazy, insular tossers. [Editor - you may want to tone this down a bit. MMS - no, I really don’t.] 

3. It’s not about the money

A number of years ago a journalist asked how long AC/DC would keep at it, implying they were dinosaurs staggering around the touring circuit purely for the cash. Malcolm is said to have replied: “Look, the family’s worth over a hundred and fifty million dollars now, mate. You really think we’re still doing this for the fucking money?”

History has shown time and again that nobody has a reliable fix on the economics of running a 7-Eleven, never mind an entire country. Anybody who claims to know the effect of either being in or out of the EU is deluded or lying. Nobody has a clue what they’re talking about, and their pronouncements are worthless. Yes, it may cost us to remain. It’ll sure as hell cost us to leave. Nobody knows how to do those sums. It’s not about the money. It's about collective dedication and cultural diversity and inclusivity. It’s about being European. 

Before the last ice age, Britain was attached to the mainland. Under the water, it still is. To pretend otherwise is to be swayed by self-serving bullshit spilled by... Well, let’s look at these guys:

Michael Gove — a man who has already demonstrated what a threat to worthwhile social values he is, and whose own father has called him out for telling lies about his childhood to bolster arguments for leaving the EU. 

Nigel fucking Farage — a man who basically like the chairman of some dreary local golf club in the 1970s, running the place with smug, matey bonhomie (and quietly turning down applications from black people and Jews and women) until it turns out he’s been skimming the funds for years to pay for sex with underage badgers.

And of course, dear, bumbling Boris — a cold, smart, arrogant bastard masquerading as a buffoon, who’s been telling lies about the EU for decades and is now turning it up to eleven for the chance to be the worst Prime Minister we’ve ever had.

Everybody wants to be the lead guitarist, to get all the attention, to spend their lives saying “Look at me! I'm special!” The truth is it’s the musicians and countries with the maturity and character to stand there serving the band and getting the job done that contribute most positively to history.

I freely accept there’s no compelling reason for you to give a crap what I think, but just in case my position isn’t yet clear: don’t let this trio of lying, self-aggrandizing wankstains scare you into dissolving union with some of the most fascinating, extraordinary countries in the world, thus losing the chance to help shape a future we can be proud of, rather than embarrassed by.

C'est tout.

Fathers’ Day

A few years ago, on a drive up through the Monterey Bay — the trip after which we decided to leave London and come live in Santa Cruz — we stopped for coffee at a tiny town called Moss Landing. From the highway there’s not much to see (there’s not a lot to see in Moss Landing from any angle, to be honest) and the only reason you’ll stop is a line of food stalls by the road, hawking produce from the Pajaro Valley that surrounds it. Suspiciously cheap avocados, artichokes, garlic, a wealth other fruit and vegetables. As I was wandering up and down the aisles I came across something that triggered a sudden visceral memory. It was a small, cookie-like thing, peanuts bound with a pale pink sugary substance. I picked it up, and smelled it, and was transported back forty years, like some low-rent Proust wearing shorts and sunglasses. 

I spent a year of my childhood in New South Wales, Australia, in a small town called Armidale. One day a week I was given a little money to buy lunch at school. My mother made it the rest of the time. She didn’t get into viral-on-Facebook parenting porn like drawing a different picture on each lunch sack, but she put them together with quiet efficiency and love (mainly efficiency, I suspect, because cranking out stuff day after day is a large part of real parenting, and the love is unspoken, and comes with the territory). On that one day a week, I always bought a little box of candy that tasted identical to the thing I found at Moss Landing (I have no idea what it’s called, and it’s impossible to describe the taste except by saying it’s self-evidently not even slightly good for you). It was my favorite thing, and decades later, that’s all I remember. Not the countless times my mother made my lunch. I have no idea what she made. The usual fairly healthy stuff you put together for your kids when there’s not much time, I guess, though in the early 1970s “healthy” meant something different to what it does now. Anything that wasn't provably radioactive was pretty much fine.

Sadly I have no memory of my mother's efforts, but that’s ninety percent of parenting: providing the dependable, forgettable backdrop against which other events and people stand out and will be remembered. Moms are the bedrock of this (still, even in these slightly emancipated times, usually that unseen force that magically creates clean beds and towels and paired socks, in addition to socializing you, and providing a cloud of non-negotiable and (largely) unconditional love that will always have your back, even if at times you wish it didn’t). 

But dads do it too. Quietly, covertly, distantly, even a little bad-temperedly — which is useful, in its way, because when you eventually emerge into the real world not everyone’s going to be nice to you the whole time, especially if you’re being an asshole. Father figures, regardless of their gender, give a different spin on childhood, and collaborate with you on it. You shape and constrain their path through life just as much as they help you find yours. They show you other things, provide additional information and different styles of support, and every important decision they make will have you at its heart.    

To be clear, I’m not talking about me — I’m a fucking useless parent. No, seriously — ask around. I’m talking about my dad (whose love for his family is boundless, and who has relentlessly supported us regardless of how daft we're being), and other dads. They’re not just about bad jokes and mocking your choice of music and being excessively invested in sports and dutifully pushing the shopping cart back across the Safeway lot and refusing to ask for directions and obsessing about work and being grumpy for no obvious reason. Amongst other roles they bar the door against the zombie hordes of your future life and responsibilities, holding that world at bay for as long as they can; but it’s often them, too, who’ll crack it open once in a while, to give you a glimpse at what’s coming down the road; before finally throwing it wide, declaring — “Time to go slay your own zombies, my child. Call your mom once in a while, for crying out loud. Oh, and we’re putting your room on Airbnb.”

At a time when more and more people are brandishing the simplistic and divisive term “toxic masculinity”, let’s remember there’s a non-toxic type, too, and plenty of humans with a Y chromosome (and some without) who are doing the best they can to be a person worth knowing, and loving, and a dad worthy of the name. And that one of those might be your dad, and today he deserves a hug.

Make it brief, though. Don’t freak him out. Especially if he’s trying to watch the game.

My dad. He's nearly 80, you know. 

If Social Media Was Real Life

It has recently been announced that from the year 2017, all real-life interactions will be required to conform to models derived from social media: sign-up forms will be available in schools, Safeway and the DMV. As a public service, I am providing a guide in order to assist you in choosing which medium to adopt. You’re welcome. 
 
LINKEDIN
A group of people sit in an airport lounge. 
The first says: “I have an inspirational observation about how every day is a chance to start becoming the best you can be.”
Another says: “I have a new eBook out. My friend liked it.”
A woman offers to sell them all insights on how to acquire 5,000+ connections, like she has, without ever making it clear why that would be useful. 
A man sits muttering appropriate but impenetrable things about the business he is in.
But all these people are deaf, and blind. And no planes fly from this airport any more. 
 
 SNAPCHAT
 “I’m a teenager!”
 “I’m a teenager too!”
 “I wish I was still a teenager!”
 “I want to sell shit to teenagers!”
 “I’m a teenager!”
 etc
 
YOUTUBE
A young woman walks into a town square with a violin, and starts playing Bach, quite well. 
A man strides up to her and throws a dollar in the hat, gushing: “Your playing is an immaculate confection, a glimpse into the mind of God, a bounteous gift to us all in this glorious shining moment of infinity.”
She frowns, and says: “What?”
Another man arrives and briskly informs the violinist that her intonation is uneven and that because he knows everything about classical music he prefers the 1973 recording by Yevgeny Madeupovich.
Two children then run into the square, accuse everyone of being gay or Muslim or fuckfaces, and start punching people. This goes on for ever. 
Realizing she’s wasting her time, the woman stops playing and instead reminds everyone of the great, great savings available at their local Honda dealership this weekend.
 
QUORA
A tall, handsome CEO in chinos and a nice shirt stands at the front of a lecture theater. He knows everything about start-ups, and once had a conversation with Steve Jobs. Earnest young students pipe up with questions designed to show how smart they already are. The man answers their questions correctly. Luckily most of them are about what it was like to meet Steve Jobs. 
 
MEDIUM
A pleasant, airy coffee shop. People sit sipping small-batch coffee and nibbling artisan croissants. Every now and then someone stands up and explains for three, five or nine minutes precisely how evolved, productive or pissed off they are. Eventually it becomes clear that these are the only three subjects but everyone keeps listening because once in a while someone accidentally says something genuinely interesting, and also there’s nothing else to do. 
 
TWITTER
A pub, half an hour from closing time — except this bar never shuts. It’s always in that hectic, drink-this-one-quickly-and-order-another period, just before the fights break out.
A man quietly observes that he thinks guns might not be a great thing. A bug-eyed lunatic comes running out of the toilets and batters him to the ground. In triumph he then strides to the bar and orders a rifle for everyone in the room. Meanwhile, a social justice warrior sidles up to the first man’s prone body and kicks him repeatedly for using a semi colon in his tweet, when everyone knows they are an instrument of oppression and rape culture.
The reactionary loon and SJW wind up getting drunk together and shouting at everyone, while a group of crazy people stand round the man’s prone body in a circle, bleating — “This thing just happened! This thing just happened! This thing just happened!”
Meanwhile, strangers occasionally wander in and try to sell people irrelevant software, services or video games. 
The man eventually crawls out of the bar and limps back to Facebook, where it’s safer. 
 
FACEBOOK
Lots of people stand in a park. It is warm and sunny, but one person looks sad. 
“Something bad just happened,’ he says. “But I don’t want to talk about it.”
A woman says: “Aw, poor you. But that’s a weird co-incidence — something awesome is about to happen to me, and I can’t talk about that either! It’s going to be super-exciting, though!”
“But — what about my thing?”
“You won’t say what it is.”
“But neither will you!”
Another woman approaches. “My life is extremely fulfilling,’ she says, ‘I feel #blessed.” Everyone ignores her. Meanwhile, two men start arguing about something from mutually entrenched positions of unsophisticated dogmatism. The discussion gets very loud, and there’s a danger of people becoming upset. 
But then someone points and says: “Hey — a cute cat!”
Everyone looks at the cat, and smiles. 

Personally, as I’m useless and annoying on all social media, I shall stick to mainly avoiding human contact, as usual. 

The Internet Is Full of Shit

Time to Read: Far Too Long
Genre: Rampant Misanthropy
Heart-warming Moral: Not Applicable

Christ, it’s nearly February already. 

One of my riskier resolutions for 2016 was to try to be more myself. Now I’ve tried this before and to be honest the reviews were extremely mixed, but it’s struck me that I actually have far too many friends and this might be a way of divesting myself of most, or maybe all, of them. 

So to kick it off in First World style, this morning Medium emailed me with links to "articles" they thought I might find interesting (Medium has clearly never met me). One of them started like this:

“The other day a friend called me and asked me how I’m so awesome. And this made me think, yes, as a service to all personkind, I should share my top forty seven life-hacks for awesomeness: game-changing insights into the kind of transformative fabulousness that enables me to have self-published the Amazon almost-bestseller “I’m Awesome, But In A Cool Way”, as well as recording the “Being Earnestly Awesome” podcast twice a week, and additionally finding time to monetize my awesomeness through my site www.Imtotallyawesomeandyoucoudlbetoom.... And where better to share this wisdom than on Medium, which is fucking full of this shit?”

Okay, I didn’t really read that. But I could have done. And so I thought I’d outline (in a listicle, obviously, because that’s the only way we can exchange information these days) nine things about writing on the Internet that really piss me off. 

1. People sitting indoors writing think-pieces about how the holy grail of CREATIVITY requires us to engage with life, look after our health, and most of all spend time outdoors — to be read by people who are sitting indoors and have no intention of going out, ever, unless it’s to buy a soy latte. 

2. People churning out listicles detailing the habits of successful entrepreneurs — in which the habits are ones they’ve clearly developed only after being validated by success (and have plenty of cash to finance said habits) or else have simply fabricated in order to sound wise, evolved and serene. So — you spend ten minutes every morning centering in stillness, do you? That sounds nice. Your family must be a fuck sight better-tempered than mine is at seven a.m.

3. And endless humble-brags where people bang on and on about starting, running, and closing start-ups — all of which seem to have been deeply spiritual experiences in which they’ve learned and grown a very great deal. Not just, like, fucked up and lost a ton of other people’s money. Because we never fail. Every resounding failure is a step on the road to success. Not merely a depressing waste of a year or two. That would never do. You can’t build a brand from that. 

4. And titles that start with FIVE THINGS I LEARNED FROM… all centred around the concerns of over-privileged westerners living in the Bay Area: and no, of course I don’t want to learn about the deep instinctual wisdom of itinerant pencil-sharpeners in Turkmenistan or the tax strategies of boudin-jugglers in rural Manhattan — I’m an over-privileged westerner living in the Bay Area, and happy that way. But can we at least agree that some subjects have been done to death, and find new ones? I’d love to see writing that encouraged us to consider the thing itself, rather than endlessly re-examining our experience of it. And the sorry truth is you haven’t learned anything, my earnest friend. You’re just recycling a non-event for the sake of a three-minute-read (and when did we start needing to be reassured, before we embarked upon reading, that it wouldn’t take too much of our precious time?) in the hope this will reinforce your personal brand, when in fact your piece will be flicked through with near-total disinterest by someone having a poo.

5. And bollocks to personal brands, too. Trying not to be an asshole all the time is all the personal branding I’m capable of. And there's a lot of work still to do on that, clearly. 

6. And for the last ****ing time, there are no apps I HAVE to download, nor brunch venues in Bruges I simply MUST visit, and I don’t give a flying fuck what any of the Kardashians are doing or who they’re temporarily married to or how big their arse is these days, and I never will. And Number 27 in your click-bait parade of Haunted Eggcups, Hotels Made Of Brie, or Celebrities Who’ve Dared to Age And Now Don’t Look As Hot As They Used To will not make me soil myself in astonishment. 

7. And software people, stop turning every to-do app into “an innovative platform for teams to communicate in real time”. We already have one of those. It’s sticking your head out of your pod and shouting “Oi, Bob — are you going to write that fucking report, or what?” And stop game-changing things and stop coming up with terms like “scalable authenticity”, because they make me angry and sad. And stop mis-using the word “simplistic” for the love of god or I will come and batter you to death with a pretzel. And stop putting an extra “ic” on the end of the word “minimalist” — can’t you see the irony in making this word longer? For GOD’S SAKE. 

8. And stop offering me life-hacks. It’s just a modish word for “tips”, and thus nowhere near as hip as you seem to think. And the “life-hacks” that other creatives, parents or human beings have for making their existence less of a train wreck are either painfully obvious or never work for me. Quite a lot of time and effort in recent years suggests that I am who I am and there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it. I am irredeemable. You probably are too. 

9. And while I’m losing friends and not-influencing people...

Good Folk of Goodreads: you giving your eBook away is not an “event”, so please stop inviting me because all it does is put a little red dot on my app that takes four tedious clicks to get rid of.People of Twitter, you’re completely wrong about everything, except where your views exactly coincide with mine.People of FaceBook, neither science nor religion is infallible — and greater minds than ours have failed to fathom the eternal mysteries — so shut up and show me more pictures of cats.People of LinkedIn, I care about your new book as little as you care about my book: we are like stray dogs baying into an eternal night of indifference.People of Instagram… actually, you win. Nobody ever says anything on Instagram unless it’s nice.Pinterest is okay, too. It haz pictures of ruins and cabins and art and things and stuff.But finally, denizens of Quora: asking strangers how you can become a millionaire by the age of thirty is the act of a stone cold loser; billionaires work unsurprisingly long hours; your $50 logo is very poor indeed; yes, fucking obviously it's worth going to Paris; and meeting Steve Jobs was cool. There, you're done — now go play outside. 

But see: now I’m doing it, too — telling people to go outside. What’s that about? Maybe everybody who’s outside is forever telling each other to go inside. Maybe we should all swap places. Or stay where we are. Or both. Or perhaps there truly is no inside or outside, only a vast ineffable here-ness and an eternal never-ending moment of Now — a bit like standing in line for the Starbucks in Safeway on a Sunday morning. 

I have no idea what I’m even saying any more. There’s no moral to this piece. I’m full of shit too. My advice is to go find a cosy pub and drink heavily for several days. There, I’ve said it. And while we’re talking about sacks of excrement, stop encouraging Donald Trump. It isn’t funny any more. 

Merry Ememess

Some of you may be aware that toward the end of this month — in some parts of the world — a popular festival is celebrated to mark the approximate birthday of a man whose life and teachings have great resonance within a well-known (if not universally-respected) spiritual paradigm. It is not a body of thought to which I personally adhere, but its influence on world history and culture is nonetheless hard to deny. 

Plus, people give each other stuff, which is awesome. 

And also my point. I’m going to ask you to remember for a moment a memorable Christmas gift you received: a thing you’d always secretly wanted, but never thought could be yours — or maybe a small but wonderful surprise that brought a beatific smile to your face — perhaps lost now, but warm in recollection. Got it? Good.

Now put all that out of your mind and imagine giving somebody one of my eBooks instead. 

Why on earth would you do that?

Someone might actually like to receive the book/s. Someone might hate them, and so this would be a weirdly passive aggressive way of getting at them during the holiday season, which is always fun and totally in the spirit of things.We live an increasingly virtual world. So why not give a virtual Christmas stocking? Not only will it be much easier to shove things into at the last minute, all your friends will be dismayed at how you’ve out-zeitgeisted them, and if Christmas isn’t about dismaying your friends then I don’t know what is.One of the earliest settlers in the Big Sur region was an illiterate prospector called Al Clark. Wild-eyed and shaggy of beard, he spent decades exploring the wilderness around Pico Blanco mountain, cited by local tribes as the birthplace of all creation. In addition to a now-lost and probably legendary silver mine, Clark claimed to have found a deep, hidden cave whose walls were covered in pictograms of long-extinct mammals — a find which predated the discovery of the Lascaux caves in France by some years. Before his death he allegedly used dynamite to block this cave up again, to save it from the depredations of mankind. Curiously, it was later discovered that Clark was far from illiterate, holding a degree from Columbia University, and also that in actuality he was (some claim) the scion of a prominent pretzel-manufacturing dynasty in Vermont. This cave has long been believed to be merely the fabrication of a bearded loon, but recently an expedition from UC Santa Cruz found it, and were amazed to discover not just pictures of animals on its walls but something that was clearly a prehistoric representation of an eBook, with the name “Michael Marshall Smith” on the cover. Next to it was a picture of some people not-buying it, and then an image that can only portray Earth cracking in two and the end of civilisation as we know it. As always one must be cautious about applying the interpretive preconceptions of modern man to the works of antiquity, but on the other hand, why take the risk?

Almost all of those are slightly true, and anyway that’s my best shot. Just go take a look at the damned site, will you? This kind of self-pimping makes my soul shrivel, and I can't afford that to happen. My soul is looking pretty wraith-like and dusty as it is. There's a cowled figure who hangs out on the crossroads downtown who keeps saying he could make use of it, and to honest, I'm tempted to do a deal where he could at least lease it. It’s not like I’m using it anyway. And he pays in Starbucks gift cards.

What's more, I’m marking the season by giving away another short story on the site. This time it’s UNBELIEF, which has a relevance to the time of year — and the cover features the poster for the truly excellent short movie version of it directed by Fabien Martorell. Please note that this tale is not suitable for children, those of a nervous disposition, or anyone who thinks Donald Trump would make a good president — because it contains polysyllabic words, and no pictures. 

No purchase necessary. T&C probably apply but I think I’ve said enough.

Go visit the ****ing site. 

Paris Happened

I don’t even know why I’m writing this, because it won’t change anybody’s mind and will doubtless piss some people off. I'm sure what I'm about to say is ill-informed, superficial and naive. 

But for me, one of the most depressing things about the recent events in Paris is this — nothing will change as a result. Nobody’s listening. Everybody is merely using it as evidence that they were correct in their entrenched positions. The event might as well just not have happened. 

All those people died for nothing.

The xenophobes and gun nuts use such atrocities as proof that they’re justified in hating difference, and to demand the right to own things that kill people. Most feel this merely as an instinctual stirring in their anxious guts — others, like the Republican candidates, and appalling egomaniac sociopaths like Ann Coulter, consciously use it promote their pre-existing agendas. This is what terrorists crave — to stoke the fires of inhumanity, to validate haters of all nations, creeds and colours. To increase their power, as, for a brief, horrific moment, the utter cowardice enshrined in murdering innocents and then blowing yourself up — rather than at least having the balls to take the justice that should follow — increased the specious power of the psychopaths. 

The anti-religion crowd will use it to bolster their belief that all religions are evil. They are not. Religions and myth are priceless, irreplaceable sets of cultural and historically-informed metaphor for understanding the human condition on both personal and societal levels. No other interpretive tool comes to close to their sophistication, to the depth that comes from having been road-tested over centuries or millennia — certainly not reductionist science, which doesn’t care and doesn’t have the tools to address these issues, and not sociology nor psychology either. 

For the record, I don’t believe in a “God”. Neither did Nietzsche, but when he famously declared that weary ghost to be dead, what he actually meant was that such metaphors lose their edge and die when rigidified into structures of social control. They become pinned to our histories like butterflies, dead but still-bright remnants ripe for mis-use by the damaged and self-obsessed — whether they claim to be Muslim, Christian or anything else. Ranting against religion is missing the point by a country mile. Religion is not the problem. People are. 

And the majority of humankind, the league of powerless, empathetic sane people? We wring our hands and ask why we can’t all just be nice, and we temporarily change our avatars, and engage in pointless social media skirmishes with assholes, and then go and cook something for dinner. 

We are shaken, depressed, deeply moved… but life goes on.  

The blood soaking into the streets of one of the world’s most glorious cities, blood shed by members of one of the bravest, most admirable nations on the planet, was not spilt because of Islam, or irreconcilable differences between east and west, or a hundred other easy sound bites. It was lost because nobody ever fucking listens to anyone else, nobody ever raises their heads above the comforting parapet of their own scripts and beliefs and trapping histories, and so nothing ever changes. 

The truth is that blood was sprayed across the walls of Paris — and please let's not forget the deaths in Beirut, they're just as real — because some people love it when that happens. That’s the bottom line. They love it. They always have. They always will. 

So what do we do? 

We reject, repudiate and turn our backs. 

Otherwise it’s as if we’re living in an infinite, terrible moment of singularity, in which there are no real events, and nothing that happens ever alters the future. If we want to move forward, to actually change the world, we have to change ourselves first — or better still, choose to consciously celebrate and promote what’s already there. We have to listen to our own quiet voices, the voices that tell us to look after old pets, and to care about the homeless, and be open to other ways of living and loving, and that certain things are right, and others are wrong — and ignore the lunatic howls of the vicious ones that prowl though our societies, whether hiding in alleyways with guns, or talking poisonous bullshit in bars or across Twitter or on television. 

None of this will ever get solved, and anyone who claims otherwise is a liar or naive. This is the way we are, and so this is the kind of thing that will always happen. 

But there are other kinds of thing that will always happen, too. The people who will open their doors to the dispossessed and ill-treated, who immediately organise relief, who risk their lives to save others. That’s us, too. The one thing that’s truly cheered me over the last few days were the photographs of Parisians bloody-mindedly sitting outside bistros in the cold, the night after the attacks, drinking their beers and smoking their cigarettes and flipping the bird at the bad guys, whatever hole they’ve gone back to lurking in. 

That’s what will work in the long run. It’s the only thing that will work, and help us prevail. It comes down to The League of Empathetic Sane People, digging in, keeping on keeping on, living a great big FUCK YOU to the ones whose lustmord will always bring fresh horror into our lives. In every generation they’ll find a new way and a new excuse to kill a bunch of us. So what? There’s a lot more of us, and in the end we’ll win — if we carry on carrying on. 

There is only one true and eternal conflict in the history of humankind: the endless war between the Empathetic Sane People and the other ones. We have to take greater pride in being ourselves, whatever colour we are, whatever religion — or lack of it — we profess. We need to yet more steadfastly ignore everyone who tries to shove us down the dark roads.

We have to reach out to those who seem different and take their hands and find out… yes, they’re different — isn’t that fucking great? And we have to every day, and in every way, turn our backs on the people who wish us to feel otherwise, to deny them an audience, to carry on our lives as if they don’t exist. To turn them into ghosts, banging their spectral fists against the windows, powerless to join the rest of us outside, looking after each other, living our lives in the sun. 

Otherwise, Paris never happened.