Lance Armstrong again

A part of me wouldn’t mind seeing him crack and fall apart, but it’s not the best part of me. The high of being entertained doesn’t last long anyway, and after it wears off you only need more. I get the impression a handful of journalists are now writing about Armstrong with extra venom because for many years they were made by editors to conceal the truth behind his myth. They are extracting vengeance for the fact they once had to go along with the lie being inflated in the commercial interests of Armstrong, the International Cycling Union, and the sales of their own newspapers. It’s telling that in such a game, the media always have to win out. They stonewall the detractors when helping to blow up the bubble, and then forget all humanity when given the opportunity to pop it. In every stage, actual people are the losers.

Two journalists in particular stand out for the tenacity they showed in bringing about the Armstrong story, for following their consciences rather than their career interests. They are David Walsh and Paul Kimmage, they’ve shown journalism in its best and most principled light, my worry is that now they could be called to assist the media in the less noble act of twisting the knife.

David Walsh could certainly help in this. Armstrong is known to have made particularly poisonous remarks about Walsh’s son, John, who was killed when knocked off his bike at the age of 12. Armstrong is said to have told his team mates that Walsh had some sort of a vendetta against cycling on account of his son’s death. According to Armstrong, this was the reason Walsh stuck at the doping allegations. In part he was right, Walsh always said the memory of his son helped him go after the truth, the meaning of that changes now it’s accepted Armstrong and not Walsh was the liar in it all. Cycling journalist, Daniel Coyle, reported back to Walsh that Armstrong had once fumed it was sick Walsh could ever have had a “favourite son”, all part of the delusion and zero-empathy that comes with the territory for anyone who has allowed drugs to take over their life. To his credit, David Walsh has said that yes he’d accept the apology Armstrong half-offered when speaking to Oprah Winfrey last week.

Paul Kimmage has been no less admirable in his pursuit of Armstrong, but whereas there was a certain sadness to Walsh’s battle, Kimmage came across like more of a scrapper. A professional cyclist from the eighties, his was another career held back by the will to race clean, and in Kimmage there always seemed like there was more bitterness. Writing yesterday in The Guardian, Kimmage reproduced an anecdote from the early nineties, when Lance Armstrong’s mother visited the American Tour de France winner, Greg LeMond, in Minneapolis, asking advice on behalf of her newly world champion son. Kimmage reports her final question as, “how do I make him less of an asshole? He doesn’t care about anyone.”

There is a lot that Lance Armstrong has not yet dealt with, there are a lot more truths that he kept quiet from Winfrey, but does he (or we) really need to know that his own mother was calling him an asshole?  The journalists who have covered Armstrong closest, and who have suffered most from his bullying, could now themselves be transformed from objective reporters into characters in the story, their own understandable grievances exploited to keep the drama flowing. That won’t help the sport of cycling they so obviously love, it won’t help them as people, and last of all – not that many of us still care – it won’t help Lance Armstrong.

Paul Kimmage has said the first 39 seconds of Armstrong’s interview were honest, when he repeated “yes” to all questions about whether he had taken performance enhancing drugs. For the rest of the interview, Kimmage said he was laughing at Armstrong; I can understand why, it was textbook Armstrong, and Armstrong is hilarious. He answered with the same sportsman’s clichés, the facile truisms that suffice at the end of a stage of the Tour but just don’t cut it in an act of public trial, where more was anticipated than just a competitive athlete’s poor grasp of emotion and social psychology. Armstrong professed to have looked up the word ‘cheat’ in the dictionary, realising it didn’t apply to him, because he wasn’t gaining an advantage but only levelling the playing field by doping. Armstrong’s guy-next-door was on show with “I don't know if you pulled those two words out of the air, “jerk” and “humanitarian”, I’d say I was both.” Armstrong the public figure is hilarious, but part of this whole process should be his slipping away into anonymity, so that he can be hilarious with those few who remain affiliated with him, or better still, so that they can help him see what an ass he has been and help him learn how to be less of one. There is a lot of animosity going around that does nothing for the many people Armstrong wronged, most of whom seem humane enough to want vindication and heartfelt apologies, rather than for Armstrong to be torn limb from limb by a rabid, celebrity-crazed mob.

This isn’t to say Lance Armstrong has done all that should have been expected of him. His was a mainstream confession extracted by/given to a mainstream inquisitor. Dozens of figures from the cycling world are incensed by the amount Winfrey allowed him to get away with. He hasn’t shown any great remorse for the way he pathologically tried to smear Greg LeMond, Emma O’Reilly, and Betsy Andreu, raging that they were alcoholics, prostitutes or just plain liars for questioning his story. Nor has he asked forgiveness for the way he threatened these figures with promises that he could ruin their careers and their lives. It seems Armstrong has recently contacted some of these people in person, they say he’s sounded genuinely repentant in a way that he perhaps never could in a public broadcast. One enormous sticking point is that Armstrong didn’t mention the incident at the hospital bed, when Andreu was present as Armstrong told his cancer doctors that he had been involved in doping. This was the episode around which he defamed and intimidated Andreu, and his silence can’t be justified by only Armstrong's will to protect those other friends and doctors who were present at the same bedside but chose to help in his lie. For me, the worst omission of the interview would be Christophe Bassons, the young, French cyclist bullied out of the peloton and his career by Armstrong (among others) because he would neither dope nor stay quiet about doping in the sport. The overriding injustice in it all, which deserves more mention than it will receive, is that the cheating athlete got his millions, the cheated sports corporations will recoup many of those millions although they got their exposure at the time, and those who spent wages or pocket money acquiring the same kit as their hero will be left with only a souvenir of their gullibility. It’s a tough but worthwhile lesson; don’t buy-in to someone else’s triumphs as a substitute for your own.

More than the omissions, however, was the fact Armstrong continued lying during the interview, and this is where the cycling community have rightfully been far from appeased in their anger. Armstrong said that his comeback in 2009 was clean, while blood tests showed a high red blood cell count but a standard number of young cells in the blood, suggesting a transfusion of mature blood cells to help boost performance. He said he donated $100,000 to the UCI because the UCI asked him to as a wealthy man, whereas his former teammates Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton have both stated under oath he had failed a drugs test at the 2001 Tour of Switzerland and the payment was to bury the results. Armstrong reasoned that his cancer had turned him into a doper, desperate to win at all costs; one more delusion trying to reconcile repeated wrongdoing with an ever-adjustable version of truth. When for all intents and purposes someone has become a drug addict, it’s worth noting that truth in their head can become a malleable thing, an arrangement of facts that justifies conduct, not necessarily an arrangement of facts that resembles reality as found in the majority consensus. Even Winfrey was able to remind Armstrong that – as per his confession – he had started doping before cancer.

In such a fashion as this, Armstrong talked his way through the majority of his two hours on Oprah, a man obviously briefed and scared against the prospect of more lawsuits and prosecution. His need to justify himself and his inability to show contrition reveals a sad, loveless man, one who in his own head probably tortures himself more thoroughly than the entire population of Twitter could ever achieve. The apparent lust for the breakdown that never came seems to be fuelled – certainly outside of cycling – by something much more sinister than a desire for truth.  For me the memory of Marco Pantani hangs over much of the Armstrong case; another of cycling’s fallen stars, Pantani died from a drug overdose in a hotel room in 2004, and don’t doubt that were Armstrong to go the same way we’d have another raft of opinion and comment urging self-reflection on how monstrous our bloodlust had been.

For me the underlying message is that Armstrong’s heroics were always artificial, beginning to end it was only ever a fairytale. The idea that Armstrong’s appearance on Oprah should’ve ended with similarly cathartic perfection would’ve only been one more homage to life by media, life by television. Armstrong confirmed he was undergoing therapy, that he needed to rebuild his life out of dark times. His eyes watered slightly (the headlines eagerly said 'cried') when he talked of having to tell his son not to defend him any longer, that the kids at school who said his dad was a cheat were actually right. Armstrong enjoyed his decade in the limelight, he happily made himself public property because that public adored him. What he now seems intent on doing is keeping his breakdown – or whatever breakdown will or won’t come – to himself. Some of the dissatisfaction with this half-confession seems as much anything to be a dissatisfaction with this privacy. People who believed so ardently want to see Armstrong suffer in return for making them look and feel like fools. Some who stuck their necks out to call the truth a long time ago want a better acknowledgment of just how right they were all along. I understand both positions, but I hope he doesn’t give them that pleasure, I hope they cease desiring it. An artificially won stardom that drives a man to ruin, repentance, and then forgiveness in the courtroom of Oprah Winfrey could only ever have been a victory for the cult of celebrity, and a loss for humans everywhere.

It might seem like an ending, but I’d guess the Lance Armstrong crucifixion is just starting. Editors are aware of how much more there is to be drawn out. Armstrong’s collusion with a corrupt UCI is another layer in the story, Paul Kimmage may be called upon for an Armstrong tried to ruin my life episode, Armstrong lied to Oprah (gasp!) will be another one to look out for. Let’s hope the prosecution won’t sink as low as Armstrong did in the effort to make it personal.

Alex Jones and a radical disservice

A week ago it's almost certain I'd have had to introduce most people to Alex Jones. Since he went off his rocker at Piers Morgan in a rant about guns, he's been trending almost non-stop on UK Twitter, and the chances are a good many more people have now heard of him.

I've known of Alex Jones and his Infowars site for a few years now, never developing much of a liking for the man, largely because of the part of his personality that was remorselessly on show in the CNN interview with Morgan. Max Kaiser, who has a regular slot on Russian network, RT, and is a media friend of Alex Jones, offered Twitter support in talking about the stand-off with Morgan, who he referred to as a "shirt lifting ponce". There are innumerable valid ways to insult Piers Morgan without raising the idea that he's gay or that, if he was, there'd be some sort of problem with it. In Jones' aggression, and Kaiser's remarks about sexuality, the extremist wing of alternative media demonstrated why they are seen as unappealing and ugly by the majority of the watching world. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily do to assume that any or all of these men (Morgan included) were being entirely genuine in his conduct, the ever extreme and incoherent Glenn Beck has already come out in criticism of Alex Jones the lunatic, a reminder that whatever the overlaps, these media personalities are designed to appeal to audiences and generate revenues. In order to do this they have to be controversial, and they have to distinguish themselves from one another.

Aside from this, there is a sad story that will be buried in Jones' idiocy, and that is the fact that he often has a very valid point. Few would argue with the injustice by which western taxpayers are now paying the wages and bonuses of bankers who might justifiably have been locked up for fraud. Money laundering on behalf of Mexican drugs cartels, the fixing of Libor, credit ratings agencies sharing their ratings criteria with banks, the strong connection between the US Treasury and former Goldman Sachs employees; these are the pet projects of Jones et al, no sane person would argue against condemning such abuses of power, and you could read about the same issues in the pages of most mainstream newspapers. On other issues Jones is even quite forward thinking; agribusiness and corporate control of food, disaster capitalism and the corporations that benefit from post hurricane and flooding cleanups (Naomi Klein makes similar points), the unsavoury Islamist-monarchist-tribalist melange of Libyan rebels would have been discussed by Jones while mainstream media was still in an orgy of freedom fighters vs. tyranny. Whether it be the official secrets act that will guard postmortem results from the murder/suicide of Iraq WMD scientist, David Kelly, for another seven decades, the now-accepted truth that American involvement in Vietnam was justified by a staged incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, or Israeli plans to drum up international support by bombing the populations of their allies in the Lavon affair, there is also a lot of historical evidence for the fact that - as Jones would suggest - we are often too trusting of our governments. By presenting himself as a raging idiot, Jones discredits both the need for radical change in society, but also the validity of much of what he raises on his own website. For a man who speaks of The Media as a tool of the Global Elite and their plan to demonise dissent and establish a New World Order, Jones certainly made no great effort not to walk into the sort of trap he makes a living talking about.

His views on gun ownership in particular are insightful. Certainly on this side of the Atlantic, either through ignorance or misconstruction of the argument, much has been made of the idea that Americans have a constitutional attachment to guns as part of a hunting culture. That Americans are culturally attached to guns and hunting is beyond doubt, however, the constitutional element of gun ownership is more specifically so that Americans can protect themselves against a tyrannical government. As Jones told Morgan, "the Second Amendment isn't about duck hunting", and it's precisely the idea of armed insurrection that secures a place for automatic weapons and military hardware in the hearts of millions of Americans. Curbing gun ownership can't be addressed without discussing this fact, and by only talking about gun ownership as a tool of hunting, gun control advocates will very easily be accused of helping to disarm the nation in readiness for subjugation by the federal government.

More useful is to look at the emotions behind this particular brand of politics. For one, Jones clearly envisages himself at the forefront of a movement for a better society, although that said it's unlikely anyone would ever regard their personal goals as being a worse society. Slavoj Zizek's "Save us from the Saviours" seems pertinent. Beyond all question is that his media promotes and encourages a willingness to fight for our freedom, the problem is that the fight seems to be just as crucial to the vision as the freedom, debates about freedom-to and freedom-from do not even begin to exist, and so the movement ends up co-opting the innocent and impressionable minds of many people of the not unreasonable opinion that, well, the world could be a bit better. Whether Alex Jones cares more about the population at large, or simply his significance within that population, is up for debate. As with much media of a similar genre, the self-perception of his audience could be typified as a downtrodden but informed cadre, bravely resisting the hordes of ignorant "lemmings" and "sheeple" (I do, I confess, quite like "sheeple" as a portmanteau of sheep and people). Whatever case there is to be made for the invaluable role of ignorance inside a modern political economy, such a scathing and loveless judgment of the masses leaves one questioning whether (or even why?) these antagonists would ever want to improve the lot of a population they seem to resent so intensely. The need for firearms - an almost convincing substitute for power within a disempowered politics - is much more symbol than tool; Waco 1993, when homemade bazookas still proved no match for federal use of tanks, is evidence that no amount of horded firepower can resist a federal onslaught. You soon find yourself of the opinion that Jones and his followers value the notion of heroism, and even martyrdom, more than they value the notion of progressive change. Positive campaigning and harnessing consensus seem to be low on their list of priorities, and it's telling that Jones' website is already murmuring that he is being primed for assassination following his brave outburst.

In his excellent book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, Virginian Joe Bageant dissects the mentality of the early American settlers, brining a wild and foreign land to heel, a Darwinian utopia based upon survival of the fittest. Jones' threat - that the American Revolution of 1776 will be revisited if firearms are taken away - is evidence of how many Americans still live inside this history, and for every Twitter liberal whose cyber bubble condemns Jones the lunatic, people must be aware that a different bubble will be praising Jones the hero for saying it as it is in the cradle of leftist media. I know many gun owning Americans who dislike the NRA and who would never become members, these are the sort of people who will talk about the NRA's business case for gun proliferation, and indeed Jones' normal tenacity for capitalist vested interest seems to be suspended where the NRA is concerned. Millions of pragmatic American gun owners will argue for gun control far more effectively than any number of outraged and ideologically driven liberals, and we should beware the polarisation that frequently sinks sensible politics. As media entities, both Jones and Morgan have a vested interest in the former and not the latter. It would seem harsh to assume that Jones himself does not care at all about the causes he espouses, if his capacity for self-reflection is a match for his self-promotion, he'll soon realise the disservice he's performed.

And it rained.

So I'm working on some short stories these days, a sort of playful politics I suppose... we'll see what comes of them, here's one about all this rain we keep having, and what it means for food prices.

It rained. It rained and rained and after it had finished raining then so it would start to rain again. Nobody could remember a summer so wet, people felt short-changed, stitched up by nature, and when autumn and winter proved no drier, so they started to lament that the weather… like everything else… had once been better. The rain fell. It fell onto the concrete they had lain over the earth, gushing into rivers, streams and seas, spilling into those fields not yet concreted, so that the puddles filled and then grew and then spread into bogs. The earth was washed away, pulling rocks and stones and pebbles down country roads that turned to torrents, the tarmac crumbling as debris rolled over it and water forced its way into the small fissures that first opened and then gaped. The earth was washed away, stripped from around the trees so that tendril like masses of roots were first pulled into view and then upended altogether when the storms blew and the trees could no longer hold the ground. Riverbanks collapsed, cliffs collapsed, escarpments of land collapsed. In the affluent regions west of London, the rich blew tearful noses into handkerchiefs as they saw their boat houses swallowed by the river Thames, as they stood helpless in the doorway and watched the carpet turn from a velveteen red to a muddy brown. In the south west of the country the banks of aggregate that held the railway tracks started sinking into fields so that trains were at first delayed and then cancelled. In a village called Ottery, the house at the foot of the hill was demolished. The possibility of flooding meant the house had always been a fraction of the price of every other on the street, but as years passed and the floods grew worse, it became obvious that nobody would live there ever again.

In the countryside the rain seemed to fall heavier even than in the towns, although perhaps it was that there the rain could not simply rush away into gutters and drains. Vicars responded to murmurs from the pews, this was not – they assured their congregations – either a second flood or necessarily even punishment for the wickedness of mankind. Farmers stood in their doorways and shook their heads, trying to recall a time when the world had been so miserably wet. Cows were shut inside sheds and barns, the farmers fearful that the hooves of their herds would soon turn the ground to quagmires. Unable to leave their cows outside eating grass, the farmers were forced to buy straw and silage and feed for their herds, so that those farmers who did not go bankrupt altogether were forced to double the price of their milk and meat. As rivals went out of business, some of the richer farmers smiled long and cynical smiles at the plight of the small farms, for they had always used their own land to grow feed of their own. As it went on raining, and raining, eventually it had rained until the tracks leading out to the fields were washed away, so that the tractors could neither reach the fields nor harvest the crops without getting stuck in mud or causing banks of earth to fold beneath their weight. The wheat drowned, the harvest failed. The fruit trees were stunted, the harvest failed. The potatoes were struck with blight, the harvest failed. The vegetables didn’t get enough sunlight. The harvest failed. All over the world the harvest failed

As rain kept on falling down so food prices kept on rising up, floating higher on the rivers that crept slowly up their flood defences. The cost of a loaf of bread doubled and then tripled, soon it had risen so high nobody could remember by how many times the original price had been eclipsed. The price of meat stayed low, for a while at least, as farmers all over the world rushed to slaughter their dairy cows before feed costs overtook their entire income. Six months later, once that glut of slaughtered meat was over, the price of a steak was a thousand times what it had once been. After that slaughter of most of the dairy cows, a pint of milk went up tenfold, and butter and cheese went from basic items to foods of luxury. The cost of pasta went up, the cost of beans went up, the cost of rice went up, and people who had been used to full stomachs became slowly accustomed to smaller meals made up of foods they liked less. The word crisis is so terribly overused… and yet… with no word of exaggeration, here was a crisis.

Budgets were stretched as waistlines shrunk, and yet the food shortages were destined to affect some more than others. There had always been a number of people for whom eating took a greater amount of the money available to them, for whom trips to the shops had always been acts of careful prudence and sensible spending, a weekly ritual inserted into life to make them painfully aware that they had no money. For want of any better words, and cutting to the point, let’s just call these people for that they were. The Poor. The cost of food became first angering and finally heartbreaking, embarrassedly the politicians avoided mentioning how many people had come to rely on charities for their meals, and most of those with a little more money became gradually more skilled in ignoring a problem that was not their own.

The poor didn’t think to complain that this hardship was unfair, it’s an untold truth that poor people expect life to be hard, and they generally blame themselves rather than anybody else when things get harder. They kept the hunger to themselves and tried taking practical steps to improve the situation. First of all, most obviously, they started to eat less. Next… in order to save money for food… they turned off the heating in their houses. Then… in order to have more money for food… they worked harder. And yet the problem of their hunger was particularly cruel, for the poor people found that when their houses were cold they had to eat more. And the poor people found that the harder they worked the more they had to eat. Slowly the poor grew thin. As the rain kept on falling they grew thinner and thinner, and slowly it seemed that the most crowded parts of towns and cities were becoming less crowded. Those who could still afford to eat remarked that the high cost of food was a good thing, that many of the poor had grown fat. “A little bit of hardship will be good for them” was the sort of thing people would remark, and at dinner parties people made conversation about the improved health of the nation since greediness had ceased to be an option. Of course there were many who felt these opinions to be in bad taste, and lots of well intentioned people loved nothing more than going out at night to give food to long queues of the starving poor. Streetlamps shone in the curve of ladles, steam rose from bubbling pans and haggard faces slid one by one into the night, each one more empty than the last, like train carriages shunted along to a knackers yard. Many heated conversations were had around dinner tables as friends and acquaintances argued, working up great appetites in deciding whether the poor deserved their fate or were victims of a great injustice.

In time there emerged reports that hunger had led to cannibalism, that in the poorest parts of the country the poor had taken to rounding up the dead and dying, butchering them for meat and feeding the flesh to the living. Many refused to believe that such a thing could ever be true, but as the reports and evidence grew, and as piles of bones were found beneath newly dug earth in parks and fields, it became accepted as fact, and even the most well meaning of people shuddered to think that the poor could have become so bestial.

Years went by and people forgot that they had once lived in an age of different weather, an age where a week of consecutive rain might have seemed unusual or unpleasant. People seldom left the house without an umbrella, and with this and other small changes, so they adjusted and forgot what once had been. The price of food became stable at its once unaffordable rate, and the problem of the poor and how to feed them slipped from memory. Society was quieter it seemed, more peaceful and less violent… everyone remarked on how the everyday person had become better educated than they once had been, it seemed that uncouth behaviour, bad manners and shouting in public had all become things of the past. Drunkenness and fighting on a weekend night had become far less commonplace, and it was hard to argue that society did not seem to be altogether quite harmonious. Everybody knew what had happened. At the time the newspapers had reported on the graves, on the empty houses, the bones, the final crawling corpses, more dead than alive, who had been put out of their misery when they arrived at the hospitals. Everybody knew what had happened, but they refrained from talking about as much. Sometimes… sometimes… if you paid close attention, and were talking to someone a little flippant, you would catch a glimmer in the eye or a quirk to the mouth, a small and guilty smile that said everything. People were happier this way, life was better.

Drive to Work Day 2012

Today was London's first Drive To Work Day, what the organisers called an opportunity to "enjoy the freedom of London streets empty of pesky cyclers and walkers." The results were fairly predictable, although not too different from what anyone who travels frequently in central London might expect. Lots of cars moving very slowly. Even without cyclists leaving their bikes at home and public transporters leaving Oyster cards in wallets, hundreds of thousands of motorists were out in force to prove the satirical point.

 

By chance Drive to Work Day was also the release of the UK Census data, where amongst many car and public transport gems was the fact that 42% of Londoners now survive happily with neither a car nor van. This fact is struggling to filter upwards, under Mayor Boris Johnson the price of bus travel has risen faster than the congestion charge, a bizarre decision to incentivise personal car use over public transport. At central government level, the freeze in fuel duty is evidence of similar priorities.

Closer to the ground, business and local government seem to be better attuned to a changing world. The Borough of Camden have just announced a trialled closure to through traffic on streets that serve Covent Garden, with the aim to improve conditions for residents, retailers and shoppers. Private sector interests are hoping to remove the metal "bus wall" that dominates Oxford Street, Britain's main shopping destination. The notion of Peak Oil has quietly been joined by the arrival of Peak Car, and developed nations are showing a definite trend of cars left at home. It was long ago that General Motors started making more money from financing arrangements than selling cars outright, and this year they turned to MTV's owners, Viacom, in the hope of making cars cool for a generation who hasn't grown up under their parents' infatuation with the motorcar. Smartphones, 3D films, and Nintendo Wii have made the combustion engine appear more than a little dated.

Of course there are also the human costs associated with car culture, London last week saw the death of its fourteenth person on a bicycle, and pedestrian deaths went up by 33 per cent in 2011. These statistics seem to have done little to alarm either Transport for London, the Mayor's Office, or the public at large, which presents the uncomfortable truth that tragedy is calculated as value of human life versus the extent to which motor traffic has been normalised in our collective conscience. Over in the US, Chicago has started to figure this out and take action, they recently adopted the Scandinavian approach of making zero fatalities the central principle in transport planning. Any other walk of life and this might be a bit of a no-brainer, somehow the dehumanised world of urban transport - where people are defined not as people but by their mode of transport (cyclists, pedestrians, drivers) - has developed not only an aversion to common sense, but also a pretty strong immunity to the emotions of death.

Generation Forsaken - A new media opportunity

And so George Osborne told the Tory Party conference of his plans to cut housing benefit for the under 25s... just think of the happy families, the bonding experiences for graduate children unable to find jobs and parents worrying about theirs. Last week I started reading an article and made it through three lines before reaching the words ‘unpaid internship’. That was when I stopped reading the article, and I hope it’s not only me who’s fed up of reading about how severely I’ve been screwed as a young person in Britain.

Six months ago I was listening to the author Anna Minton speaking about the Olympics at a café in Hackney. When the time for questions came around, a member of the crowd from the Occupy movement asked what she would actually be doing to protest the Olympics, and having just summarised the retrospectively added Olympics chapter from her book Ground Control, Minton sort of shrugged and said researching and writing was more “what she did.” I don’t want to criticise Anna Minton, she writes and researches brilliantly on the under reported subject of private control of public space. At the same time, for the broader issue of dissent… the Occupy protester had a point.

 For all the high human costs, the suffering, anxiety, frustration and sense of doom, the economic thrashing being dished out to Generation Rent has created one new industry out of the need for people to write about it. This isn’t surprising, it is after all infuriatingly unfair (and therefore good media) that people should have to do high quality work, without pay, before they have any chance of landing themselves a real job that will even then probably be low paid and not very secure. We don’t expect pensions, we didn’t get half the benefits of the post-World War II welfare state, we pay the buy-to-let mortgages of those who did but hope is not lost because the Comment is Free desk needs somebody to tell them about the torturous experience of having to live at home with their parents after university. Somebody a few years younger has the opportunity to write about how the education maintenance allowance helped them and how much harder life will be without it. Someone else gets to write about how £9,000 tuition fees will scupper their plans of going to university. The Higher Education Statistics Agency reckons that 2010-11 saw an intake of some 12,500 students of media studies or journalism, helping to create a body of approximately 50,000 students in the field of mass communication and documentation. The figures suggest the supply of young journalists and their hardship stories is likely to increase even as demand shrinks. A handful will get moments of success when their experience or opinions are called upon, and based on an ability to articulate our sorry state of affairs a smaller number will make it onto the bottom rung of the journalistic ladder. Most will be left high and dry when the media markets decide that people have developed unfairness fatigue and that we need a new social injustice juggernaut.

Conspicuous in all this is that we’re a generation raised on a fetish for documenting events rather than creating them. Whether our social lives on Facebook or microthoughts on Twitter, we’re obsessed with telling people how we’re feeling rather than actually doing much about it. Too proud for protest, too private for the streets, a generation of intellects beg the media to make something notable of their grievances rather than taking to politics to redress them. There’s something of an End of History hangover in it all, the ill effects of growing up in a neoliberal zenith so empty of alternatives that people have been left incapable of envisaging change. If post World War II gave us Baby Boomers then we must be Generation Forsaken, or the Timorous Twenty-Somethings… any piece of alliteration that summarises people lamenting their problems without the chutzpah to do much about them.

At the heart of the issue is a generation who sees itself without a stake in our politics, we live in our parents’ society and under their ground rules just as we might live in their houses and under their roof. Young people have no stake in our society because in reality we’re living someone else’s society, a generation that was born into something and has at no point had to partake in reordering it. We have no Tahrir or Syntagma Square moments of our own, the best mobilisation of dissent in our own Parliament Square was the Sri Lankan Tamil community making better use of our democracy than we trouble to ourselves. As far as progress is concerned, and it’s always good to include a little hope, the most positive developments are perhaps gains made by the campaign to lower the voting age to 16. The idea seems to have made inroads into the Labour party, would increase the power of young people in society, and would help instill politics in minds whilst they are still in their formative years. It’s a step in the right direction, but the solutions to the problem need to be framed, and even forced, from outside parliament rather than from within it. Osborne’s plan for housing benefits is evidence that it’s no good waiting around for a government to sort out the mess we’ve inherited, and nor should demands be limited to a housing benefit by which government helps us pay the landlords of a society we can't afford to live in.

Of course I sympathise with the victims of these unfairnesses. From high rents to non-existent jobs I’m part of the generation, but nobody gets anywhere feeling sorry for themselves. There’s an irony that I’ll submit these words into the same market place I’m condemning, I’ll pitch it as the unfairness of no more commissions to write about unfairness, but perhaps that can help draw a line under this little cottage industry. We’ve been had… screwed… it’s now more important to start doing something about these injustices than to only go on talking about them.

Mitt Romney and Big Bird

Having almost recovered from suggesting that 47% of American voters were scroungers, Mitt Romney didn’t waste time retaining the nasty mantle in America’s presidential election campaign. In a performance that most felt won him the first election debate with Barack Obama, Romney said that he would cut public funding to PBS, the broadcaster of Sesame Street. Romney made clear that Sesame Street was exactly what he had in mind by saying, “I love Big Bird… But I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for.”

America has rushed to Big Bird’s defence. Obama joked that it was time somebody got tough on Big Bird, a FiredBigBird Twitter account quickly attracted 30,000 followers, and parents and children have uploaded videos of support to YouTube. Romney’s plans to rein-in Big Bird go back almost a year, when he told an audience that “Big Bird is going to have advertisements”, and he taps into a general misconception amongst Americans that PBS claims huge quantities of government money. In 2011 an opinion poll found 40 per cent of Americans believed PBS accounted for between 1 and 5 per cent of government spending. The actual figure is 0.0001 per cent, between 1 and 5 per cent of US government spending would give public broadcasting about $300bn to play with.

The Sesame Street argument reveals three things about Romney’s Republicans. First of all, on the idea of advertising products to children, we see that nothing is sacred in the Republican understanding of free markets. Second of all is a disinterest in educational programming. Lastly is a failure to appreciate the positive spillovers from government investment.  Romney’s Republicans see a capitalist economy as one in which people start businesses and get rich, with the government ever trying to stand in their way. Sesame Street is a little closer to the reality. The programme started in 1968 with funding from the Carnegie foundation, the US government and the Ford Foundation among others. It helped develop Jim Henson’s Muppets into the commercially successful brand that sold for $680million in 2000, before being bought by Disney in 2004. Sesame Street is broadcast in more than a hundred countries to more than a hundred million viewers, including a 2011 debut in Afghanistan, where the show brings a softer version of US foreign policy. In going after Sesame Street we can see that Romney is not only failing to recognise an American institution when he sees one, he’s also attacking a successful business.

Ed Miliband, One Nation... and who's this Disraeli chap?

It's easier to think highly of people after they're dead. It's even easier to think highly of them if they died almost a century and a half ago and have a statue in Parliament Square. Early on in yesterday's conference speech, Ed Miliband name dropped Benjamin Disraeli and his 'One Nation' pitch to the Tory party of the 1870s. By the time he finished up an hour later the Labour leader had said "One Nation" another forty-five times. Of Disraeli, Miliband started out with "he was a Tory, but don't let that put you off", indeed there are plenty of reasons to dislike Disraeli aside from his party.

Given that Miliband's speech took aim at Britain's bankers it's ironic that Disraeli had both made and lost a fortune playing the markets with shares in mining companies. Given the high value Miliband afforded to tolerance it's ironic that Disraeli was such a reactionary figure when it came to the rights of Catholics, especially in Ireland. When Disraeli took the office of Prime Minister for the first of his two ministries, he famously announced that he had "climbed to the top of the greasy pole", and yet Disraeli was a politician who did more than most to grease the pole in the first place. He fell out with Sir Robert Peel when the Prime Minister overlooked him in forming a government in 1841, and in retribution Disraeli became an influential opponent of the Corn Law Repeal that Peel forced through the Tory government against the interests of the landed aristocracy and in favour of the working poor. What would today be known as an arch flip-flopper, Disraeli's great rival, William Gladstone, became consumed with an almost religious zeal to do away with the "Beaconsfieldism" (Disraeli was made Earl of Beaconsfield by Queen Victoria) by which Disraeli governed without any consistent principles. Away from home and Disraeli was something of a war monger, his close relationship with Queen Victoria was useful given his frequent unpopularity with politicians and public alike, and as such he was an imperialist by nature. He recommended that Victoria should make herself Empress of India, and took Britain into Afghanistan to expand her empire against the interests of Russia. Towards this same aim he was unmoved by Ottoman atrocities in the Balkans, and looked rather to the need for Ottoman allegiance against Tsar Alexander II.

During his time in office Disraeli did conduct reforms to the good of the working poor, permitting a degree of union action and legislating for improvements to public health and housing. In 1867 his Tory government beat the Liberals in the race to extend voting rights to almost a million workers and thereby harness the impetus of the Reform movement to Tory advantage. For the most part Disraeli was a very human politician, that is to say that he was self-preserving, opportunistic and frequently petty. He was not the pantomime villain that many of his contemporaries made of him, often with anti-semitic allusions to his Jewish background, but neither is there much reason beyond his notoriety to celebrate him a hundred and forty years on.

The nod that Disraeli got yesterday in Manchester makes me fear for the Labour Party conference of the year 2152, when delegates hear of the visionary David Cameron and his plan for a 'Big Society'. At lunch the conference delegates will unplug themselves from the conference and plug themselves into the restaurant table without having to leave their seats. Some of them will teleport home whilst others take the everyman option and climb into their hovercar. The politics won't have changed much, which is why the same lines will work just as well, and Cameron will bring with him nothing more than the approval of a stock character from history.

Miliband and Cameron - Don't follow leaders

If you haven't already heard that the country prefers Labour to Tories, but also feel safer with Cameron than Miliband, then you soon will. It's the latest thing to talk about, and people keep talking about it despite the fact that Britain tends to vote for parties rather than prime ministers. One Labour writer recently hypothesised that the media, and in particular the right wing press, would soon turn on Miliband. The idea runs that until now they've given him an easy time of things, and when Cameron rejects Leveson demands for newspaper regulation, the Mail and the Telegraph will ratchet up the rhetoric in gratitude. If this is true, and it doesn't seem like a ludicrous suggestion, then what we will need is a mass outbreak of common sense.

I doubt many of my readers are also regular readers of the Telegraph or the Mail, so I may just be preaching to the choir, but sometimes that's useful too. I'd also like to stress that I'm no Labour supporter... nothing annoys me more than the idea that without the current Tory government everything would be fine, and nothing could be worse than the idea that just voting Labour at the next election will allow everyone to sit back and watch everything get better. Whoever you vote for... the government gets in, and all politicians are the same. I sympathise with both statements, but some politicians are worse than others, and some governments are worse than others. I suppose I'm writing this because I know intelligent people who have spoken grudgingly well of Cameron the statesman, and it's this that gives him a lead in the perception of leadership. So let me clarify a few things.

Cameron is a disaster, a trusting fool, and an all round policy idiot. He kept faith with both Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks beyond the point at which they were obviously going to contaminate his own public standing, indicating that he has a chronic lack of judgment. His 'Calm down, dear' remark to Angela Eagle, and others like them, show a man not only out of touch with the majority of the country who aren't millionaires, but a man also out of touch with the half of the country who are not men, and the large majority of women who don't potter around country homes in aprons, wondering what to cook for dinner. The man's politics reveal a complete poverty of ideas, which leaves him relying on ideologies of neoliberalism fused with a Charles Dickens novel, this despite the fact that neoliberal policies created the country he calls 'broken', and despite the fact that Charles Dickens was writing two hundred years ago. Cameron can think no further than cutting taxes for the rich and cutting welfare for the poor because he was raised in a conservative family, in conservative academic institutions and has emerged from this life experience without an original thought in his head. But we all knew this.

What Cameron seems to have going for him, however, is also the very reason that he's disliked. He's posh. Really damn posh. Distant cousin of the queen, Etonian, Oxford, son of Panmure Gordon stockbroker, millionaire a handful of times over. His entire life schooling has placed him above the social and economic levels at which most people live, and as a result he knows exactly how to look down on commoners. He can appear unflappable because he doesn't care, he was elected Prime Minister and that's it. Cameron doesn't have to do anything other than look statesmanly because he's already made his parents proud and he's so far removed from the rest of the population that he will never really know if he's made their lives better or worse anyway. This is why Cameron looks like a good Prime Minister, and it's also why he's a terrible one. It doesn't matter if Ed Miliband looks boring, if he's got a square head or a dull manner, we shouldn't want anything more than good politics from our politicians, and when sensible people put emphasis on superficial characteristics we are contributing to the very thing that makes our politics so cheap, nasty and bad. If politicians think that all they have to do is seem assured to earn the electorate's favour then there's no reason to do anything but. In the case of Cameron this is an even more crucial point, because to approve of a politician of such little ability and substance, but only because of the way he carries himself, strengthens the poisonous idea that in Britain there is a class of people born to rule and a class of people who need to be ruled over.

If you want a hero, if you want someone with charisma and an other worldly allure then go and read a book or watch Braveheart or something, look to rock and roll or a novelist, maybe even go and do that heroic and charismatic thing you've always been meaning to do yourself. As far as politics is concerned, vote for someone who cares enough to fluff a sentence now and then, not a politician so far up his own arse, and so full of class-induced self-righteousness that he can reel off entire speeches of nothingness without a glitch. What I'm saying is that if you want a politician to make the country marginally better, in the real world... don't worry if he might seem like a bit of a dork... dorks tend to do less harm than sociopaths and their divine, narcissistic missions.

Why this was not about a film trailer

For a time last year westerners fell in love with Al-Jazeera. Armchair revolutionaries watched as archetypal despots were overthrown by archetypal freedom fighters, you might say that liberals felt a pang of vicarious empowerment that our domestic politics tends to deny us. It made for good viewing, in no small part because of the simplicity of the story we were given. After the revolutions were over, we changed channel.

The Muslim world, however, did not, and both before and since the fall of the Gaddafi regime, Muslims around the middle east were watching civilians killed by the dozen in drone attacks on Pakistan, they were watching Palestinian communities driven into poverty and mocked by Israeli security forces for the privilege. We changed the channel, and remained largely unconcerned by the middle east until fanatics blew up an ambassador. It needs to be stated forcefully that this is not about a ten minute piece of film propaganda, created by Christian fundamentalists in America. “Innocence of Muslims” is absolutely, categorically the tip of the iceberg. The idea that Muslims around the world are becoming violent over a film propagates some Victorian idea of a hysterical and semi-civilised breed of robed madmen; it’s the religious equivalent of David Cameron’s "Calm down,  dear!" reaction to Angela Eagle. Muslims around the world are incensed for legitimate reasons, and when their anger boils over in ugly fashion, they will watch Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton stand bravely failing to understand how people can be so hateful, and how America remains committed to freedom. Clinton and Obama felt, no doubt, that they were speaking truthfully and with integrity; that this is so is only testament to the way attacks against Islamic nations have become normalised in our thinking, and meanwhile we’ll see at least one more drone attack on Pakistan before the end of the week.

But it’s not only the middle east where Muslims are made to suffer, and just because westerners are terrifyingly unaware of as much, we shouldn’t assume Muslims are too. When was the last time you read an article about the Muslim population of the Philippines being bombed by the Christian state in Manila? Did you ever hear the one about 78 Thai Muslims suffocated in transportation by the Buddhist police detaining them? Occasionally, and only because of violent eruptions, we hear of the Muslim population of Uyghur, in north west China, being driven towards cultural extermination by the renaming of settlements, denial of job opportunities, and torture of activists. Each one of these brutal responses to legitimate political grievances have been welcomed under the umbrella of ‘anti-terror’ since September 11^th 2001; just because the west chooses to remain clueless about this wider picture, we'd be wrong to assume that in an age of global media the Muslim community is similarly in the dark. Muslims do not have some peculiar complex of victimhood… Muslims are victims, and you can demonstrate as much without even needing to mention the monstrosities of justice that have taken place in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay.

In the aftermath of the recent violence, we will have Muslims depicted as highly strung and over sensitive, just as was done in the wake of the Mohammad cartoons. It’s true that healthy relations include both ridicule and criticism; we make fun of Germans for being uptight and efficient, we make fun of Brits for being inhibited, we make fun of Americans for being brash.  But we don’t drop bombs on them. If you want to make fun of people you really shouldn’t also wage a near constant and only vaguely justified war against them, and if you want to make such a war against them you shouldn’t make fun of them. Harmless jokes (not that ‘Innocence of Muslims’ was anything like it) might be acceptable amongst those with normal, healthy relations, but in a context of the endless slurs and violence that the west dispatch or permit against Muslims, you can understand how it might feel like the final straw. It is evidence of just how desensitised we are to the effects of drone attacks and air strikes that people will talk of the exercise of free speech, no matter how offensive, as no just incitement to killing people. We do genuinely seem to have forgotten that our foreign policies are killing Muslims on a daily basis, the uncomfortable truth is we just don’t care.

A cultural boycott. In America.

A Republican Party party wouldn’t be much fun. At the convention in Tampa, Florida, the GOP wheeled in a couple of brass bands, which doubled as a means of providing music whilst getting some American minorities inside a blindingly white convention hall. Up in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Democrats have lost the voice of hip-hop superstar, Jay-Z, since 2008, but still retain the services of Dave Grohl, who closed out the convention with his Foofighters. Grohl is a little less famous than Jay-Z, but with hip-hop drowning in consumerism and misogyny, you might say the music of the former Nirvana drummer is better suited anyway.

At about the same time, Michael Stipe prohibited the Fox network using REM’s ‘Losing my Religion’ in its convention coverage. In a statement through Warner-Tamerlane Music the singer said, “We have little or no respect for their puff adder brand of reportage. Our music does not belong there.”

The Republican candidate for vice president, Paul Ryan, is an anti-women’s rights Christian fundamentalist, a rabid free market dogmatist, and has lied about everything from factory closures to his personal best time for a marathon. Confusingly, he has also said that Rage Against the Machine are his favourite band, despite admitting apparently not listening to the lyrics (worrying in a politician). Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine’s guitarist, and a vocal backer of the Occupy movement, wrote a Rolling Stone editorial on the subject. “Charles Manson loved The Beatles but didn’t understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen and doesn’t understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favourite band, Rage Against the Machine.”

Bruce Springsteen refuses to acknowledge communications from Chris Christie, the arch conservative, union-busting and budget slashing governor in his home state of New Jersey. The Boss won’t be any stranger to being misunderstood, ever since Ronald Reagan used Born in the USA as a campaign song, Springsteen has unwittingly provided US nationalists with a keynote anthem. Ryan’s disinterest in lyrics is obviously not unique amongst conservatives; Born in the USA was an anti-war song about Vietnam, complete with a refrain of, “Sent me off to a foreign land/ To go and kill the yellow man.”

Watching the GOP convention it’s hard not to feel that fanatics have hijacked the Republican Party. Their politics is an embarrassment to Eisenhower, to Roosevelt, to Lincoln, and to the Republicans who battled for worker’s rights and unions in what was a better day for politics. Fanatics need anthems, only in their stubborn single-mindedness they lack the respect for the world’s uncertainty, and the questioning, critical spirit that underpins all good art and music. As a result, their music is made by those who oppose their ideologies. The party conventions in America demonstrated the depth of the rift between the parties in US politics... if they’re ever to be brought back together it will require people to be delicate with their criticisms. I have some sympathy for the Tea Party Republican base, people who feel let down by their country, and who will not be won-round by liberals who wish only to cast them aside as white, racist bumpkins. It’s hard to afford their leaders the same compassion, and it seems that musicians are not about to.

The way we grow food isn't working

I recently wrote a piece for openDemocracy about food production, and the way it won't continue to work in the way it currently works. The result of this will be poor people in Africa starving to death, and poor people in the western world spending money they don't have on food.

It's a really important piece of writing because it's on a subject that not enough people are talking about, and on a subject that people have the power to change through the food they buy.

Most importantly... you shouldn't buy flowers from supermarkets.

For the rest of the article, read on.

And start talking about it in the pub and around the dinner table... because that's how changes start.