intercourse with biscuits a modern miscellany

vb:

With new violence breaking out in Tehran and with the Iranian police killing 4 protesters, I’m curious if you still believe that since it’s not our country, we should not impose a government or at least perform actions to de-stabilize the current one. It’s very obvious that the people of Iran want a change and want to overthrow their oppressive government. It would seem that they simply need a shove for momentum to put them over the top.

When is it the right time to help?

Do I think we can install a government in Iran? No. Because putting puppet governments in place, whatever the original motivation is not the solution. We can offer help in many ways both through overt diplomatic action and covert military and espionage. What we cannot do is attempt to impose a new administration in Tehran using military force. There’s two reasons for that: 1) we don’t have the forces to do it and 2) foreign military forces entering Iran would not be welcomed.

Where would you propose we drew the line VB? America as world’s policeman is not sustainable. The world is a difficult and violent place with many states that do not conform to our idea of what a civilized state should look like. You seem to want us to forge a new pseudo-Roman empire, acting with a benign imperialism (possibly an oxymoron) in an attempt to create an new Pax Romanus. The world is a little bit too messy for that kind of thinking to play out in reality.

Revolutions are rarely bloodless. Look to the fall of Ceausescu 20 years ago. But unfortunately we cannot and should not try and impose our will by force. It’s not a sustainable way of conducting foreign policy. Our military capabilities are already seriously over-stretched. We can and should act in the interests of freedom whenever we can but the state of the world is more difficult to solve than by simply putting troops on the ground, especially when you’re proposing dropping them into a nuclear state with an unbalanced government and a highly militarised populous. 

At what point will flight security become so onerous that the number of people opting to fly is reduced only to people with vital journeys to make?

Since the inept Christmas Day Bomber attempted to down a Delta Airways flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the US Transportation Security Authority has launched a new set of severe guidelines for transatlantic flights including:

no leaving your seat in the last hour

no electronics use in the last hour

no visits to the bathroom in the last hour

no access to carry on baggage

no personal items in laps in the final hour

only one item of carry on luggage

ban on pilots highlighting the plane’s location

Children, the elderly, people with medical problems will struggle to comply with the toilet ban. Rows upon rows of passengers will all have the same agonised expression and crossed legs. Meanwhile the rest will just have the glazed look of boredom as they’re forced to search for any remaining interest on the inflight entertainment system.

Does the US administration have information that terrorists time their attacks for the final part of the flight? Why not ban those actions for an hour and half or two hours before landing? Why not ban them outright? Because most of the increasingly onerous security measure imposed on travellers are not real security but security as theatre, the airport variant of gesture politics.

Norman Shanks, a former head of security at airport operator BAA, told The Times that the new rules are impractical and will simply cause congestion: “Having two sets of people doing security checks is likely to make both teams relax. Suspending in-flight maps is also unlikely to have any impact. People can see they are nearing landing by looking out of the window.”

Shanks also thinks limiting hand luggage will only increase the density of the packed bags which could actually make it harder for scanner operators to identify threatening objects. He highlights the case of the shoe-bomber Richard Reid as an example of why keeping people in their seats is just little more than a gesture: “He was seated when he tried to set off a bomb in his shoe – being seated is no assurance.”

Changes to airport security over the past 10 years have been largely cosmetic, they make flying a frustrating and threatening experience typified by rude and unpleasant treatment by staff under far too much pressure. To truly reduce the threat of substances or devices being used to attack an airline you would have to ban all carry-on items, ensure that all passengers had nothing in their pockets and remove all electronic devices from them for the duration of the flight, checking that each one was turned off and not a threat. In short, it would be impossible.

We’re all becoming like the bubble boy, trapped in his germ free enclosure. He may avoid the threat of infection but he also cannot enjoy life or experience its richness. These piecemeal attempts to out think terrorists are doing little to protect us. Lockdown the flights enough and they’ll become unbearable, creating planes full of angry, uncooperative passengers while terrorists seek new targets.

It is a question of managed risks. If we take security to its most extreme application, we will be a society of bubble people, desperately denying ourselves any freedom in the hope of cheating death.

Plenty of people argue that packaging decades up with meaning is a pointless exercise, that it takes a while for decades’ to accumulate a set of historical cliches. But the 2000s (a decade that struggled even to gain a sensible nickname) arguably seems to have been accumulating meaning for the past few years like a sticky sweet grabbing fluff down the back of the sofa.

The early-2000s trend for history books summing up whole decades and talking heads shows dissecting the 20th century year by year (I still await I LOVE 1939) made the 2000s a decade that analysed itself even while it was still going.

Sometimes, TV news felt like a bad episode of The X-Factor, recap after recap of news events that occurred a few years, months or even days before. With 24-hour-news, the same reports ping-ponged at us in a shitty cycle of misery. The 2000s threw the waiting of the ‘90s and the dread of the ‘80s into sharp relief.

The ‘90s was a transitional decade, a decade where not only pop but the whole bloody carcass of culture started to eat itself. Modern art took Duchamp’s Fountain and pissed all over the idea, TV rushed even further away from drama towards the heights of “real life” programming. Politics was busy clearing out the deadwood of a Conservative government just in time to give us a brand new version of the same old faintly seedy, largely inept MPs, only this time with red rosettes on rather than blue.

In the ‘80s, the Left had a clearly defined villain to tilt at in Margaret Thatcher while she gave the Right someone to cheer. Blair, Brown and Cameron all dream of being such transformative figures but they remain in the shadow of Thatcher, compared to her and destined to be judged even more harshly than her.

Blair gave up his convictions (such as they were) to forge a closeness with the most reviled American President in modern history while Brown mortgaged his in his desperate slobbering rush for the premiership. Cameron’s time is not here yet but it looks frighteningly like it will be a moribund mishmash of Blair and Thatcher.

The ‘80s were a time of definable enemies – the IRA, the Soviet Union – the ‘90s a decade for false optimism and theories that history had ground to a halt. The credulous and callow seemed somehow to believe that the breakdown of the Soviet Union could guarantee a more peaceful Europe and that the end of “active operations” by the IRA would end the actions of the group’s most extreme wings or mean the end of terrorist threats to the UK.

Our ‘enemies’ now are harder to quantify. The noughties was also a decade of repeats, A second George Bush waging Gulf War 2: This Time It’s Because Daddy Said I Should. Old timers from previous administrations popping up in the White House like William Shatner relentlessly cropping up in Star Trek movies. “Oh look, it’s Donald Rumsfeld, back for another run round the Pentagon and there’s good old Dick Cheney, I haven’t seen him since the last time we invaded Iraq”.

Gordon Brown promising a renewed sense of purpose delivered a sequel to Tony Blair that was more divided and less coherent, like a concussed chicken had been put in charge of policy.

The ‘80s and ‘90s were the decades where we most throughly planted the seeds for Islamic fundamentalism to arrive on our doorsteps with some plastic explosives, some anthrax and a list of countries we’d fiddled about with. Buggering about with Iran and Iraq since the early 20th century obviously didn’t help but in our tireless work allowing Saudi Arabia to ride roughshod over democracy in return for oil and lack of desire to get rid of Saddam Hussein as well as years of installing puppet regimes did little to stem the rise of violent fundamentalist Islamic groups.

Fundamentalists of all stripes were the biggest danger of the noughties. If we were to distill the dangerous faces of the decade onto t-shirts, the leading contenders would have to be Osama Bin Laden and George Bush. Bin Laden represents just one of many jihadi leaders who sought to wage war on the West but appropriately he became the face of terror not only by financing vast acts of terror but also by being the one most able to exploit the age of Youtube.

George Bush was also the face of many. The neo-conservative thinkers at the heart of his administration were hawkish and keen to intervene in the Middle East before 9/11, influenced by the position of think-tanks like the Project For A New American Century. 9/11 was a transformative moment for the world not only because of the horrific number of lives lost but also because it became the unquestionable defence for using force as part of Bush’s “pre-emptive strike” doctrine.

The terrorist attacks on September 11 2001 were unquestionably one of the most terrible crimes in history. They were also a catalyst for terrible crimes, for the torture programmes of Abu Grahib, for the dark arts of extraordinary rendition where the noughties fascination with outsourcing reached its most extreme conclusion – placing interrogation in the hands of third party regimes who feel less squeamish about getting their hands bloodied.

The Blair and Bush governments soiled the reputations of both the US and the UK more thoroughly than any before them, putting their citizens in more danger and removing more freedoms in a self-defeating campaign to “defend freedom and fight terror”. An endless, unstoppable war on abstract nouns.

Eric Hobsbawm said the Short 20th Century lasted from 1914 to 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union. But while he might suggest that the 20th Century came to an end then, the 21st Century did not come early. Instead we had the Phoney Ceasefire, the prematurely declared end of history when we looked largely benignly on the collapse of our old enemies, not realising that like a nightmarish boss at the end of a computer game, they had not gone away but simply splintered into a thousand smaller, less predictable pieces.

Now Russia is on the rise again with many of the elements that were once the plutonium-tipped-umbrella-shiv sharp end of Soviet foreign policy clinging on to power. Putin slid from President to Prime Minister until he can slide back again, Russia has launched it’s own propaganda channel for the UK (Russia Today) and is working tirelessly to strengthen its umbrella of influence in the former Eastern Bloc.

Rather than moving towards nuclear disarmament, the group keeps getting bigger like a member’s club with an even more malign list of bastards on it than a bad night at the Groucho Club. North Korea is teetering like a very angry Scottish drunk who lost his leg in a shark kicking competition, China, India and Pakistan are on the verge of a very nasty set of border skirmishes and Iran’s moderates are in desperate need of support.

The noughties was the decade where everything atomised – where the enemies became less clear cut, the friends became less helpful and the future became more uncertain. Declaring the end of history didn’t make us look back and learn lessons from it any more than we had tried to at any time in our long and bloody residency on this planet. The noughties was the decade when the internet and the spread of the mobile phone made communicating far easier but it was also the decade that showed that we as a species hadn’t got any better at listening to each other.

The volume of talk keeps growing but the number of people actually saying anything is declining. The nourishing bits of popular culture are rare and rich but the distractions and the tasteless soulless pap are being dished out with ever bigger ladles. Don’t worry about the CCTV cameras or the plans to detain you indefinitely, here’s Celebrities Falling Off Ladders and When Jordan Tried Home Brain Surgery.

When America was offered a Presidential candidate who actually spoke in complex sentences and promised to be a respected figure on the world stage, it took the chance. But he had been pilloried already for not doing enough while simultaneously letting himself down by not sticking to his guns on the key issues like health care reform. Watching the man who tackled race head on when the Reverend Wright scandal bubble up to destroy his campaign, claim that he “did not campaign on a public option” is a depressing sight.

But at least the US has a leader who renewed interest in politics among its youth, at least it has a leader who has dared to talk about big ideas and seek to inspire. In the UK we have three Wurzel Gummage like men, ever ready to pull on the head they think will appeal most to the electorate – three men who were all found to have exploited the Parliamentary expenses system now crowing about how their hair shirt is itchier than everyone else’s. Gordon Brown, a man who backed reducing regulation and freeing the banks, now bashing the bankers like he’s playing a Square Mile themed game of Whack-a-mole.

As platforms like Facebook and Twitter have made it easier for us to campaign about the insignificant issues (who gets to number one, how much we dislike Jan Moir), as nation we’ve become more willing to vote for The X-Factor winner than we are to choose our leaders. The noughties have left us with a climate where Simon Cowell can suggest creating a “political X-Factor” with a red telephone for Number 10 to call and not be roundly laughed at.

The noughties was the decade that the last crumbs of belief in the political system were stomped to a fine mist by scandals and disappointments, by anti-war marches ignored and expenses fiddled. The noughties have been a decade of renewed fear and confusion but also a period in which we’ve been presented with the tools to come together more quickly.

As much as Twitter’s relationship with the Iranian elections was flawed, it was an interesting illustration of how a major news event can be altered by our ability to spread messages unmediated by “expert” commentators. Services like Twitter and Facebook open to abuse from actors in the security services but all means of communications ever invented are.

The internet has become almost as vital as a connection to the national grid or the water mains. It will become even more so in the next 10 years. Personal freedom has been under threat throughout the noughties and it’ll be a big theme in the years to come. We have to fight the desire of special interests to fight against net neutrality and seek to combat the insidious spread of CCTV and other surveillance technologies.

The evidence that they make us safer is scant, those that want to live outside of the surveillance society will find methods to do that. Mortgaging the freedoms in a democratic society that it took us hundreds of years to achieve for a specious sense of security has been one of the noughties biggest failures.

We can arrest the decline but we have to revitalise our sense of political engagement and turn the growing public conversation into something that defines solutions rather than simply highlighting complaints.

I’m planning on self-publishing a little illustrated book later in the year. I’m still looking for the right illustrator and am hoping it’ll have Edward Gorey style visuals. Here’s part of the text:

I am afraid that I am dying. This is not because of some sudden change in my circumstances. I am always afraid that I am dying. George tells me that most people do not feel this way. 



Apparently, we’re meant to sort of ignore Death as if he’s just some irritating acquaintance of a friend we once had in high school. We have to pass it in the supermarket and not even acknowledge its presence in our peripheral vision. 



Don’t wave to Death or let him see the embarrassing passport photo you got when you were 17. Do not invite Death to your birthday party because it is a friend of a friend on Facebook. Death will bring the cheap vodka and drink the expensive bottle. 



Death is always hanging around. He never pays for his share of the Pizza Express meal you share awkwardly with old school friends who may well have bullied you though you can’t quite divide their share of the guilty just like the stupid woman who was once the stupid girl with the ugly brace can’t work out who owes what, mainly because she and the anodyne blonde split that bottle of vinegary red and she’s trying to cover the extra money she owes. 



There is always someone who wants to cover the extra money they owe. Why do they think they are winning somehow when they’ve scammed £3.50 out of people they know and have shared bad small talk about the mortgage rates with. 

Say what you like about Death but Death does not bore you about mortgage rates.

Death just gets on with things, like the work experience kid too afraid to ask where the toilet was who just filed the old magazines for six hours straight.

Death came to Alastair at 4.45pm last Wednesday. He was waiting at the bus stop on Mare Street, watching some kids kick a chicken shop box down the street. Then he died. The kids didn’t even look back at the sound of the collapse, his head bouncing off the safety glass of the bus stop. 



An off-duty nurse felt for a pulse and groaned: “I’m on holiday. For fuck’s sake. I’m on holiday.” Death was off already on the 77 to Victoria. He was reading an old copy of the Metro and surveying his handiwork. 

I see Death on the TV news all the time. He’s like Forest Gump, forcing himself into the background of everything.

Death’s frequent flier miles would be the envy of even the fattest of the fat cats. Death does not fly on economy airlines, he just waits for the burning shards to hit the ground and sweeps up the scrapings.

Death stays in cheap hotels because he prefers the company. Death leaves fag holes and hot rock burns on the blankets. Death spends whole days wandering through Gaza. Death likes to throw around glitter and cliches in the mansions of prescription pill popping celebrities.

Death is tired. Death is always tired. The Devil makes work for idle hands but Death is never idle and he doesn’t know the Devil or God. In fact, Death doesn’t believe in them because they’ve not made themselves known to him ever. He knows Chance and Fate and Just Plain Fucked Up Bad Luck.

But Death does not know God and when people pray in burning buildings or in front of the muzzles of the mad-eyed militia men, he shakes his head a little at the wasted breath.

Death is more self-centred than any reality TV star. There is no one he thinks of more highly than himself. Death is an over-achiever.

Death took my mother on a Sunday afternoon on her way back from the shops. A man swerved to avoid an urban fox and straight into her and her ugly vintage stole. I took it as a fable about the foibles of wearing fur. My father didn’t get that particular line of thought.

Death came to my father with a garage door, some piping and a cloud of carbon monoxide. My sadness was mixed with a distinct disappointment that he’d lacked any real imagination.

If I snuffed myself out I’d do it in a far more interesting way, build a contraption to splatter myself beneath the heel of an over-sized boot or pay crazed dwarves to rip me to shreds.

The least you can do if you’re going to do Death’s dirty work for him is be slightly creative. And don’t throw yourself in front of the 7.25 from East Croydon. I’ll be docked pay if I’m late again this month.

I had a near Death experience once. I danced next to him at a discotheque in Berlin. He was with a hooker, a drug dealer and a man who looked like Nick Cave. I didn’t speak to him and left to go hunting for wurst. It turned out Death was staying at the same youth hostel as me. Three backpackers were found stabbed in the laundry room.

It was a depressing holiday but I have had worse. I was once made to spend a fortnight in Lowestoft with an aunt who smelt of prunes and the crusty desperation of a thirty year virgin.

Death has started to frequent the cafe near my house. I now suspect that their food safety licence is in fact a forgery. The signature looks like it was done with a crayon. Death only ever orders a cup of milky tea. He has it so weak that it is the colour of nun’s skin.

Death doesn’t do animals or the unborn kids. He subcontracts those to a pair of twins with different colour eyes. One carries a hoover for collecting half formed souls while the other has a big cage full of bones and bits of stuff. 

Death holds staff meetings with them at the Crown And Two Chairman in Soho.

Death and his employees sit by the window and wonder where the whores have gone now the Gastro-pubs have begun to seep in like pus. Death and his employees drink pints with Pernod chasers. They are fans of the steak flavour crisps because they consider them like beef crisps with pretensions, crisps that should be taken down a peg or two.

Death sleeps in a bed that’s never made beside a bed side table that always features one half-empty glass of musty night-before water. Death sleeps without snoring. He sleeps the sleep of the vaguely satisfied.

Death brings women back with him sometimes but they wake up the next day unable to remember the encounter but suddenly shockingly aware of their mortality. It is the ultimate near Death experience.

Death cannot get drunk though he tries all the time. Death smokes. He feels his should support the tobacco companies’ business as they support his so tirelessly. He has acquired a stockpile of Death’s Head cigarettes. He considers it his own brand and has inquired about a licensing deal.

Death came for Annabel in a night club toilet. Her heart just popped at the thought of another thick line of cocaine, rails for a jack-knifed train of thought. Annabel always had big appetites. They started when she was too small to know any better – a fourteen year old with unacknowledged access to her uncle’s Hunter Thompson-style stash.

Death’s never taken drugs. He’s not sure what he’d get from them. He sees enough odd things in an average work day to fill your average prannock’s entire life of trips. Drugs don’t do his job for him quick enough really.

There’s too many junkies hanging around, stumbling on. Slow going is irritating for Death, turning up at tenements to find some blue bastard being shaken out of the deadening by a friend with ice and a little bit too much persistence.