The danger of thinking in 'isms'

Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and other animals by John Gray.

Where to begin with this purile, hypocritical, book of opinionated one-up-man-ship. I'm just going to clarify that I feel perfectly valid writing this 'review' (read: trash-fest) after having only read the first five or so pages of the book. Hardly professional, but if I ever manage to keep down the rising feeling of nausea I experience whenever my eyes fall on the speciously academic pages of the book, I promise to write a full review after finishing it proper-like.
Until then: behold my sentient wrath- this book just ruined a perfectly good bath for me- the most heinous of crimes.

Guilty. Case closed. Appeal denied.

Firstly, as a man who seems dead set against anything that isn't his own opinion, Mr. Gray has used Darwin(ism) as the anchor by which his shoddy papier-mache canoe can stay moored on the sea of respectability. However. He's already fucked it up. In what can only be an effort to showcase his intellectual credentials Mr. Gray name-drops Darwin(ism) six times in a page and a half of text- 'Look at me! I found intelligent theories that help me assert my poorly constructed ones! Me is clever!'. Again, I must stress that he also does so poorly. From page one Gray tells us that Darwin(ism): '... teaches that species are only assemblies of genes, interacting at random with each other and their shifting environmments. Species cannot control their fates. Species do not exist.' [Emphasis mine] Still not too bad so far, until on the next page we see that he tries then to argue that: '... though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive *cough* species *cough* that is also one of the most predatory and destructive'. Sigh.

So beyond hypocritical hypothesis' what does Straw Dogs offer the astute reader? Plenty of conviction is evident, which... seems odd considering the manner by which Mr. Gray chides religious types for their unwavering belief and faith.

"You couldn't be hoisting yourself on your own petard, could you Mr. Gray? What's that? Sorry, I can't really hear you properly, what with your mouth being full of your own foot."

Oh, and it isn't only at the religious citizen that Mr. Gray manages to positively squirt disdain. From the beginning he sets up his foil- the (apprently abundant) Humanist. For those unused to the term it is defined, by the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, as:

'A system of thought that rejects religious beliefs and centers on humans and their values, capacities, and worth.'

JG: 'Humanism can mean many things, but for us it means belief in progress' Sorry, what? We just covered that. You're a little off by my count Mr. Gray... Fine, we'll just let that one slide, and allow you to carry on as if you know what you're doing... 'To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the powers given us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals. This is the hope of nearly everybody nowadays, but it is groundless' [Emphasis mine] Now, I'm sorry, but is the ability to extend our lives through the use of medicine and technology not sufficiently removing ourselves from the natural framework? How about the manner by which we can manufacture large quantities of food as and when we need it? Do you see people chasing gazelles on their lunch break Mr. Gray? No. No you bloody well do not. How about the ability to neutralise and destroy diseases which decimated entire generations? No? HOW ABOUT BEING ABLE TO MANUFACTURE DEVICES WHICH NEGATE THE NEED TO BASH ROCKS TOGETHER IF WE NEED FIRE OR LIGHT?!?

Ye Gods man.

Blood for the Blood God.

Headline reads: ‘Crazed man shoots girlfriend, her lover and a cop’

Old news. I guess ‘Culture of violence breeds new victims’ wouldn’t have cut it. This man wounded his ex-girlfriend WITH AN FUCKING SHOTGUN (because she dumped him while he was in jail, the reprehensible bitch), killed this woman’s new boyfriend, and then waited in ambush before shooting a policeman in his patrol car, presumably because he was bored waiting in a soggy bush for five hours.

“What bullshit! That isn’t news!” I hear you cry. What you want to hear about is the repercussions on the police force, the fines and levies, enquiries and debauched proceedings preceding the redundancies and ruinous terminations of various officers. All this- all this for having used an experimental weapon to stop a man with a twisted, and violent, a bestial soul; he was no better than a rabid animal. "What were the police doing...", I hear you cry, "... attempting to protect the lives of the men and women of Northumbria, putting the lives of those same men and women, and their own (Fascist) lives ahead of the life of such a fine, and good, man"? Was he bollocks.

If any one of us had been in their positions I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have had any qualms about using god-damn near everything we had on that DOG- he had shot three people to that point, and there was every indication that he would do so again, assuming the letter he sent to the police was genuine. It's a curious case that in a society more than happy to (routinely) put down dangerous/ overly-aggressive dogs we should be happy to make excuses for dangerous men.

The society of today seems to be on a collision course with reality. The hypocrisy of our culture (one of the most enlightened cultures in the world if you believe the rumours...) is massive; on the one hand is advocates violence across the board and on the other it demonises (albeit rightly) those who give in to it *Cough* Raoul Moat *Cough*.

Television and films have long been deplored by the faint hearted for consisting of very little, if not perpetual violence. Furthermore, the most popular video games - the icons of entire generations - have been dominated by First Person Shooters (FPSs) and Real Time Strategy (RTS) war simulators- games such as DOOM, Quake, Unreal Tournament, 007: Golden Eye, Perfect Dark, Total Annihilation, and Command & Conquer, to name but a few. I wonder why it is that entire sections of the populace begin to think that violent behaviour is nothing to be worried about? They are only exposed to it DAILY afterall. Perhaps we should bear in mind the advice of Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (look at me being all inter-textual!), when he stated that 'Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them'. In other words we've become so used to violence that we aren't instantly appalled by it any more; the thought of being violent is now easier to rationalise, thus it's easier to commit, hence the cycle continues ad nauseum.

Not only is this wave of aggression limited to fictional varieties. For some time now, violent sports have been on the rise in the West, and have enjoyed popularity for hundreds of years. American magazine 'USA Today' recently posted an online article stating that the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), an organiser & promoter of what is dubbed 'Mixed Martial Arts', has the second largest online fan base of ALL sports, worldwide; the UFC has been quoted as having '...an agressive social media strategy...'- riding the current wave of acceptance towards violence amongst Western youth groups. Despite only establishing itself in the early 1990s the UFC now has more online fans, and more of it's practioners (read: fighters) using sites like Facebook and Twitter, than any other sporting organisation- including the Premier League (though excluding the NBA).

The irony is, of course, that many of the people involved in perpetuating this culture of aggression and violence - the programmers of the games, the writers of the film scripts and the fighters of the sports - are not at all what you would expect. Usually the techies are meek individuals looking to harbour revenge fantasies because they can't look after themselves in the real world- they use their games as a form of escapism, so that they have a release for their own self loathing, that we don't routinely have to scrape brain matter from their unkempt apartments. Moving on, the fighting men involved in organisations like the UFC are usually very humble men, and yes they might come from rough backgrounds etc. etc. but they tend (for the most part) to be incredibly humble, and are just thankful that they have a chance to earn money in a constructive manner (usually by bleeding for our entertainment); they've been given a break by someone, and they know it, and are thankful for it. More than that, they can come to represent the pinnacles of incredibly important virtues- hard work, endurance (mental and physical), humility, and the importance of respect.

The problem lies in the marketing strategies, which play up the 'high impact nature of the sports, and the 'player vs. player' aspect of the games. It's not so much a case of 'ordinary' people (if there really is such a thing) being corrupted by these things, as it is a case of what will happen when corrupted people emerse themselves, or are emersed involuntarily (as many young people are) in this corrupted environment.

And let's not forget that, equally, quite a lot of the problem can be layed at the feet of public ignorance and bloodthirst creating a market for this kind of entertainment.

Stupid public. Shame on you.

Evolution theory.

So here we are, another fairly (in)glorius day of unemployment, graduate and all. Frankly, in this day and age that doesn't seem so special, perhaps I'm being melodramatic, but too much coffee, failure, and not enough sleep will do that to a man I suppose.

So far the days are recklessly colliding into each other- each one becomes a medley of job hunting, killing time and comfort eating/ drinking coffee. In our generation, studies have shown that lack of motivation and lack of structure are the biggest killers: Fuck Survival of the Fittest, we live in the age where Survival of the Least Lazy is the only credible ethos. I just spent three years of my life, and twenty thousand pounds, being twisted and pounded into a shape, only to find out that it was the wrong one- nobody wants to bash a (graduate) circle into their square little world. Fuck.

As for a career, what is there out there? What else are those bastards hiding from me? Probably not a lot; even the jobs at the Job Center are out of date when I try calling to apply. Maybe that's it? Maybe they're hiding the fact that there is nothing out there for us anymore...
The most obvious route is to go into Teaching, but MY GOD, teach what? All I've been trained to do is spot pretention at 200 yards, to go right for pedantic bastards, and the flaws in their logic (as opposed to the jugular- it's just as effective, and you get into less trouble with the police you see). The problem lies in the fact that in a world where people sell each other little pieces of the Great Televised Dream nobody wants you to snap them out of their vegetative devotions; nobody wants you to point out the small print that will wake them up- especially not the hucksters shilling it.

Here in the UK we don't have access to the American Dream, so we just make do with the Great British Lie.

Dreaming of Dean Moriarty.

Since finishing university I've been in a slump, that is, in terms of output of any kind. Creatively, I hadn't written anything since a series of short stories I was planning, which degraded and stagnated out of sheer apathy around 3 years ago. This slump remained until I read the seminal work of Jack Kerouac, the king of the Beat generation: 'On The Road'.

Mentally, this book is extraordinary. The back of my edition quoted Bob Dylan saying: 'It changed my life like it changed everyone elses'; "This", I think I spoke out loud, "This must be an exaggeration. I'm a quarter of the way through and I don't see how anyone can say that reading this is a life changing event." For the next two days I couldn't put it down- I had it with me in the bath, on the bus and everywhere in between. When I finished the book I was blown away. Now, I don't mean to over sell it, for although the prose style is very (very) fresh, it is only kind of imaginative (though contextually it would have blown more minds than mine when first published in the 1950s), and though the content of the book is solid and interesting, I could not pin-point what it was that made me feel so strongly about it upon its ending. It took some time for me to realise that this book is a fucking conductor. It tranfers energy from one thing to another- from the book to your being, and it makes you happy that it did so; you won't even notice until it's too late. The night I finished the book I was literally too energetic to stop moving, too energetic to stop speaking so fast that my thoughts barely kept up with my mouth. It was incredible. I wanted to do it; I wanted to get out into the world and to stop caring about all the bullshit that we've been fed since childhood- 'Consume - Work - Consume - Work - Die', working for the priviledge to continue consumption.

It makes you think.

Following that little revelation (alongside reading 'The Dharma Bums', and Hunter S. Thompson's 'Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas') I hope I've broken the funk I was in, and as of yesterday began writing a project I hope to bear much (cynical) fruit in the future: a treatise on the state of Britain in these troubled times, part Gonzo and part Surrealism I hope it will make enough sense for people to get something out of it, even if they don't enjoy it. As a society we're too caught up in pleasing ourselves (the narcissistic, hedonistic, sedimentary bastards that we've become) to realise that life isn't all enjoyable, that people shouldn't have everything they desire, and that the right way is often the hard way. In times like these anything to wake you out of your funk is something to cherish, and the most I can hope for, ladies and gentlemen, is to be the facilitator of that awakening.

A New Dawn

And so we begin! Today heralds a new triumphal age, wherein I can poison the minds of normal folk everywhere without leaving the (un)comfort of my own desk! Odin be praised. What an exciting time to look forward to.

The recent termination of my undergraduate degree has left me to scuttle out from under the dank rock of academia, like some form of unsightly arthropod. Ergo: I have decided, in my mania, to transcribe the events of today, into the wisdom of tomorrow.

So, I'll endeavour to update regularly (though don't expect more than two or three times a week unless I get bored) and from time to time you may well find small bonus features, in the form of reviews and short story pieces, for which you should be eternally grateful, as they will be brilliant.