Author: neilg63

Categories
All in the Mind

It’s official, Dissent is a Mental Illness

If you obsess with or consider stalking political celebrities, personally I think your fixations and potential actions are both ill-advised and in all likelihood counterproductive. Politicians not only thrive on publicity, the media would be quick to whip up a frenzy of hysteria should anyone attempt to threaten their life. An assassination attempt represents a huge a public relations coup for an unpopular member of the ruling elite. Admittedly some milder comical forms of stalking such as egg-throwing or carefully engineered stunts may, if reported accurately in the media, raise awareness of a dissident cause. After all to the best of my knowledge no politicians have ever died of custard pies or eggs being splattered all over their tailor-made suits. The trouble is these days politicians are just unthinking celebs, whose very rise to power depends on the approval of media moguls. A protest may be perfectly justified on a moral plane, but Sun readers will either be none the wiser or will be led to consider the protest as the antics of mentally deranged extremists.

Having instilled in the public mind that all sorts of inappropriate or nonconformist behaviours are caused by genetically determined mental disorders, often marketed as differences with benefits as well as downsides, diagnosing dissent as a mental disorder is the next logical step. According to an article, "Blair's secret stalker squad" penned by Jason Lewis, in the left's favourite bete noire, the Daily Mail, the government already employs psychiatrists to identify potential troublemakers. This is no longer wild conspiracy-theory territory, it's reality. However, it is true that psychological profiling can identify those most likely to channel their powers of critical thinking into active opposition to the agenda of the ruling elite. However, they merely identify people whose critical faculties have remained both intact and focussed on the misdemeanours of their own bosses, rather than on their bosses' enemies. A conformist in Stalin-era Russia would be a loyal Communist Party member happily spying on traitors and evil revisionists. The same mindset translated and adapted to the UK in the early 21st century would use her or his soft skills to identify extremists, conspiracy theorists and mavericks who might become enemies, as they see it, of our wondefully tolerant, dynamic and fun-loving democratic civilisation. Progress towards a neoliberal panacea of all-night smokefree raves and wheelchair-friendly casinos, conveniently located next to your local hypermarket, seems on par with the sales drive of your employer in the insurance business.

Notice how the British media have long described the last few remaining critical thinking politicians as mavericks, a term never used for politicians who toe the corporate or party line. Some even wonder why all dissidents are coincidentally mavericks. "Sure", some think, "I agree with much of what George Galloway/Tony Benn/Michael Meacher says, but he's just a maverick". Sooner or later the Guardian or Independent will do the nasty on any articulate person in the public eye who oversteps the margins of permissible dissent. Maybe this is one reason why so many otherwise rational commentators such as George Monbiot go out of the way to distance themselves from conspiracy theorists who fail to believe the official 9/11 story. Now I've met some of the assorted types who regularly attend 9/11 Truth group meetings. These events attract a fair number of individuals who would meet a psychiatrist's criteria for a pervasive personality disorder. Put simply your average happy-go-lucky working person, immersed in pervasive entertainment culture and preoccupied with their career and family (or whatever passes for a family these days), simply doesn't have time to consider the musings of fringe groups. They're more likely to settle for the conclusions of respected left-leaning commentators like George Monbiot, than actually think for themselves. What matters more is the calibre and prestige of opinion leaders. Read the moderated postings in the BBC's Have your Say forum or even musings in the Medialens forum and you'll soon notice the omnipresence of name-dropping and references to authoritative sources such as the BBC itself. Indeed some people in the UK refuse to believe anything until it's on Aunty Beeb (an affectionate, but often satirical nickname for the state broadcasting corporation). The Beeb is, of course, a massive organisation employing thousands of journalists and producers, many keen to investigate all sides of a story. Nonetheless some good stuff does seep through. BBC documentaries have revealed the side effects of antidepressants (Panorama on Seroxat) or in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq BBC 2 aired a documentary highlighting the role that oil plays in US administration's Mideast policy. But these tend to be the exception rather than the rule, and serve to reassure us, or the critically thinking minority among us, that Aunty Beeb remains a bastion of objectivity. This is the same BBC that consistently refers to the United States as a democracy and regularly talks of Anglo-American plans to extend democracy to Iraq, all without addressing the key issue of control of the country's oil.

Apparently some self-righteous left-leaning opinion leaders suffer a similar delusion, basically truth emerges from a consensus of high-profile experts given access to the BBC, CNN and a handful of other media outlets in the Anglosphere.

So who is more deluded? Those who challenge orthodoxy or those who swallow mainstream propaganda hook, line and sinker? In my humble opinion it is plainly naive to base your assessment of reality on the official or counter-current cult status of those advocating a position. Something is not true because MS-NBC has just aired a documentary debunking the controlled demolition theory for the vertical collapse of the World Trade Center, any more than it's true because Loose Change has some convincing video clips and David Ray Griffin seems an honest guy. What matters is evidence. If the evidence in favour of the official theory were so overwhelming, why would they seek to deny public access to so much incriminating evidence? Apart from applying one's understanding of science and politics, how can millions of mortal souls distinguish fact from fiction? While the motives of mainstream propagandists are clear, those of the 9/11 Truth movement are much less so? Some have suggested the whole conspiracy theory cult is a gigantic diversion from the real issues bedevilling humanity, such as resource depletion, nuclear war and climate change. Others view government complicity in acts of sabotage and psychological terrorism as crucial signs of a civilisation on the brink.

This morning (03/06/2007), the Aunty Beeb's news site leads on PM in Waiting Gordon Brown's support for even tougher anti-terrorism legislation, presented at a stage-managed conference in Glasgow with wonderful reassurances about checks and balances to safeguard civil liberties. Let's get this whole terrorism scare-mongering into perspective. The UK's capital attracts billions from global money laundering with sky-rocketing property prices requiring couples to earn jointly 75,000 just to buy a very humble modest 3-bedroom rabbit hutch, overcrowded transport infrastructure grinding to a halt with tube passengers packed like sardines and literally suffocating in each other's sweat and a huge influx of cheap labour and a steady outflow of native Londoners. To me, this would seem a recipe for disaster, easily exploited by gangsters, criminals and even would-be terrorists with an axe to grind against the financial or military elites. Yet unsurprisingly most residents of the sprawling metropolis are too busy competing in the rat race or coping with the sheer humiliation of not living up to the material and aesthetic expectations set by media role models, to even consider fighting the system. If Brown really cared about the safety of ordinary citizens, he might start by bringing in more socio-economic stability and thus defuse a state of of constant tension that his dynamic consumer-led economic model has instilled in us and simultaneously withdraw British forces from foreign ventures. Instead we get more of the same and worse and anyone who disagrees is labelled paranoid. The message is loud and clear. If you suspect the ruling elite may have it in for you, seek therapy, forget about your misgivings and return to your assigned role as a lowly parrot.

Categories
Power Dynamics

The Brown Broadcasting Corporation

Call me a cynic, but the BBC seems to have transitioned magnificently from its role as a covet apologist for the Blair regime to a smooth public relations operation for the emerging Brown leadership. Such a transition requires no change in logo, editorial control or political outlook. Indeed, as the electorate has grown tired of Blair's persistent hectoring and lecturing on subjects about which he is so obvioulsy ill-informed, Gordon Brown will give the New Labour project a whole new lease of life. Some English voters may not like his Scottishness, but that's quite irrelevant as his chancellorship has overseen a continuation of the steady flow of high-paid jobs away from Scotland and Northern England to the South East of England with the near total demise of the country's manufacturing sector and the flight of call centre jobs abroad.

One wonders just how Gordon Brown retained his credentials as a prudent defender of the interests of ordinary working people tied to his Scottish roots in the Lang Toun of Kirkcaldy, an area with considerable social deprivation and paradoxically the UK's highest Ritalin prescription rate (and probably lowest consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables). For his political choices over the last decade as Chancellor of Exchequer have been neither prudent nor in the interests of the traditional working classes Mr Brown claims to represent.

In the UK the best test of your overall class allegiance is not your annual income, your parents' income or even your academic background, but your favourite newspaper, whether print or online. Whether we like or not, there is a class of UK residents who instinctively buy one of the redtop tabloids, the Sun, Star, Mirror and in Scotland the Daily Record (aka the Daily Retard). As more school leavers go to university, you'll even see the shelves of student shops stacked with copies of these Celebrity Gossip comics. Without the blessing of a hanful of media magnates and their appointed editors-in-chief Thatcher would never have won such a resounding victory in 1979, 83 and 87, Kinnock might have won in 1992, but Tony Blair would never have swept to power in 1997 or retained sufficient public confidence despite his repeated warmongering, corruption and toadying to the whims of big business. The usual suspects in Scotland, the Daily Retard and the Scottish Sun, both of which have helped fuel anti-English sentiment in the past, tried their best to avert an SNP victory at the Polls. When New Labour's line manager in Holyrood, Jack McConnell, belittles the SNP's electoral gains, he does so in the full knowledge that without the gutter press the fate of the New Labour Mafia north of the border would be a whole lot worse. In short New Labour's tabloid propagandists appeal to the same tribal gut instincts that lead some to support Rangers or Celtic come what may.

Brown's left wing credentials are largely a figment of the media's and New Labour's spin machine's imagination. This is the same man who has consistently backed every single decision Tony Blair has taken on behalf of his corporate handlers. He had absolutely no qualms about hosting dinners in honour of Alan Greenberg, a person more responsible than almost anyone else for the imposition of neoliberal policies on the Third World leading to the decimation of public services and the selling off of local industries to predatory multinationals, a processs popularised as privatisation or inward investment. The only conceivable concession to those who fear a slide towards British involvement in a future US invasion of Iran seems to be his rhetorical support for a increased role of Parliament in decisions over war and peace. But let us not forget that a majority of New Labour MPs voted to support British participation in the invasion of Iraq, so why shouldn't the same bunch of lemmings fall for humanitarian propaganda that the likes of the Guardian and BBC have already begun to peddle to justify more military intervention in resource-rich regions?

Gordon Brown may give the New Labour project a temporary facelift, but don't be fooled. His prudence is as big a façade as his predecessor's integrity.

Categories
Power Dynamics

New Labour’s Legacy

Results from recent regional and local elections should bring a few cheers to those, like me, who have long distrusted New Labour. While the letters in Tony Blair nearly form an anagram for Tory Plan B (if we replace i with p), David Cameron certainly follows in the deceptive footsteps of our Tone, as the gutter press once affectionately referred to the current prime minister. In Scotland the SNP has done surprisingly well, but thanks to last minute scaremongering by the terrible twins of the Scottish tabloid press, the Daily Record and Scottish Sun (both fervently anti-independence and ultra-Blairite) and possibly a wee bit of election rigging here and there, New Labour have just one fewer MSPs than the minority SNP administration. In Wales Plaid Cymru have made impressive gains outside their traditional heartland, but once again New Labour has hung on with the prospect of a coalition with the LibDems. So basically despite New Labour getting just 27% of the vote nationally, it's business as usual for the Blairite agenda. However, one thing is certain New Labour's lead actor is moving on to pastures new as a keynote speaker on the US conference circuit. More important New Labour under Gordon Gold-dumping Brown may well not win the next election, paving the way for Mr Cameron's entry into the world of international theatrics.

To understand New Labour's legacy we need not look so much at the legislation they did pass, some mildly positive such as devolution for Scotland and Wales or the introduction of the minimum wage and some negative such as greater surveillance of private citizens, but at their role in enabling the underlying socio-economic and governmental trends that have transformed our society. All these trends trace their roots to changes that took place long before Tony Blair had even become leader of the Labour Party, the unrestrained consumerism of the late 1980s, which in turn had been a reaction to the pessimistic realism of the late 70s and early 80s. The early Thatcher government preached "back to the basics" at school, better housekeeping with large reductions in social welfare spending, privatisation and high interest rates forcing thousands of traditional manufacturers into liquidation. For a few short years some on the left saw this as a sign of the final collapse of British capitalism. Gone were the days of jobs for life handed down from father to son, tight-knit communities built around single industrial activities like car manufacturing or coal mining. We saw the birth of a new service-oriented economy centred around the naked accumulation of capital and the shameless promotion of a consumerist lifestyle. Of course, the welfare state of the 60s and 70s did not disappear, it simply adapted to a new era and to meet new challenges. Indeed after the initial Thatcherite shock therapy, the Tory establishment began to sing a more reconciliatory tune. Despite the worst fears of some pundits state education and the beloved National Health Service survived the Thatcher and Major years albeit with a steady drift towards private provision, but few doubted where the Tories' true allegiances lay.

So what are the greatest achievements of Tony Blair's junta:

  • Transfer of interest rate varying powers from a nominally elected Chancellor of the Exchequer to a bunch of unaccountable bankers at the Bank of England. How anyone could spin this as mildly progressive is beyond me, yet Blairites and Brownites alike frequently cite this as the foundation stone of the period of unprecedented consumer growth that followed.
  • Introduction of tuition fees for higher education, while simultaneously encouraging corporate and state entities to require degrees from everyone from hairdressers to environmental safety officers (read refuse disposal workers) and promoting absurd Mickey Mouse degrees.
  • Selling half of the UK gold reserveswhen the yellow metal was at an inflation-adjusted historic low, leading to a temporary boost for the US dollar, weakening the Euro and losing over £2 billion in 5 years .
  • Deregulating TV advertising and allowing the merger of major commercial networks.
  • Granting planning permission to large supermarkets to open more and large superstores, further eroding the dwindling market share of independent family-run stores.
  • Deregulating gambling and booze.
  • Deliberately subverting EU attempts to regulate adult pornography, gambling and violent video gaming, both multi-billion pound industries linked to UK businesses though often officially based abroad.
  • Regulating the culturally ingrained habits of millions of private citizens such as smoking.
  • Increasing surveillance of private citizens.
  • Overseeing a huge rise in the prescription of psychoactive drugs for mood disorders, while co-financing the promotion of new personality disorders.

Austere back-to-basics Thatcherism transitioned seamlessly to Cool Britannia Blairism, a non-entity as Anthony Blair himself has no real convictions other than his career, through the medium of MTV-style culture. Millions had been conditioned to associate homophobic, Tory-voting, church-going besuited businessmen with the old guard, and thus positively welcomed the new guard of casually dressed supercool metrosexual advertising execs. People see these products of the nouveau riche as somehow progressive, reminiscent of rebelliously philanthropic movie stars re-enacting the cultural revolution of the late 60s and early 70s. If there is any remnant correlation between conservative values and tastes and class, then we'll find much more old-fashioned mores among the provincial working classes and lower echelons of the traditional managerial classes, than among the emerging globalised ruling elite, stretching from Glibraltar-based gambling tycoons to CEOs of funky new media companies. The money is in fun culture, not in what we tend, disparagingly, to call Victorian values. Apparently it is easier to manipulate the masses if they are lulled into a false sense of joy and diverted from critical analysis of the doctrinal system. For some progress is measured in terms of the effective presentation of abstract rights and outlawing outmoded nasty habits and pursuits. So if progress means gay marriage, smoke-free pubs and an end to fox hunting, you'll be superficially pleased with New Labour's record. Instead we have dysfunctional family units with kids increasingly isolated, over five million adults on psychoactive drugs with side effects far worse than cigarettes and nearly one billion animals slain every year to meet our voracious demand. In this context New Labour's progressive achievements are very minor indeed and pale in comparison to their services to the US-centred corporate and military establishment, especially their friends at GSK, Tesco, BA Systems and KPMG to name but a few.

Categories
All in the Mind War Crimes

On The Nature of Violence

Consuming re-enactments of violence in various forms has long brought considerable pleasure to large number of people, especially but by no means exclusively, males. Quite clearly many residents of middle class suburbs in towns and cities across the prosperous world are relatively shielded from the real-world physical violence that millions experience on a daily basis in much of the world, but with extraordinary levels of intensity in regions where wars of resistance and internecine conflict rage. David Edwards of Medialens quite correctly contrasted the almost daily massacres in Iraq with the occasional school and office shoot-outs in the US and Europe. 36 dead i the Virgina Tech massacre is a tragedy, sure, but hundreds slain day in day out is an affront against humanity. However, many who have moved from some of the world's worst conflict zones to the obsessively consumerist dystopia of the wider American empire feel ironically under greater threat.

Violence means much more than the simple exertion of physical force with the intent to maim or kill others, it means the exertion of physical, sensory, mental or economic force to deny others of their livelihood, whose definition varies according to cultural expectations. To make a simple example, the only difference between machine-gunning a family of African subsistence farmers and evicting the same family from their land while failing to provide them with alternative means of sustenance is immediacy. In the former scenario they die instantly, in the second they starve slowly. So is society as it has evolved recently in the UK become more or less violent?

Nominally, it may have actually become less violent. Parents seem much less willing to resort to physical force to rein in their offspring, mindful of the consequences if their sheer frustration leads them to overstep the mark. As noted elsewhere crime statistics rely heavily on classification and reporting, but based purely on calls to national helplines there has been a huge rise in parents falling victim to physical abuse by their sons and daughters. The mass media, including the liberal establishment's BBC, also seems preoccupied with the spectre of child abuse, especially when attributable to outmoded institutions such as the Church and where the blame can be placed clearly with sad sexually deprived individuals who unleash their fantasies on the innocent. As usual such a narrow focus misses the details of a much bigger picture. Child abuse is an abstract concept. Certainly extreme deprivation leading to severe malnutrition, life-threatening disease and violence leaving permanent physical and psychological scars affect a person's long-term potential.

However, to the surprise of many wishful thinking do-gooders, back in the 70s school kids often preferred a quick dose of corporal punishment to the prospect of several hours detention or humiliation in front of their parents. This doesn't mean corporal punishment is good, but may often in the real world be viewed as the lesser of two evils. Seriously, how many children ever ended up in hospital as a result of excessive corporal punishment? Now compare this with the number hospitalised as a result of school or street fights. If teenagers are drawn into a subculture of pervasive recreational drugs, having to resort to theft or prostitution to feed their habit, who should we blame? The parents, society or some alleged genetic weakness in the kids themselves? Increasingly social workers and health professionals turn to the third explanation, but often blame controlling or traditionally strict parents. To compete in today's superficial social rat race, parents need to act and look as cool as the media role models their kids aspire to. To win your teenage daughter's trust, you may need to undergo cosmetic surgery or simply let her have her way when friends invite her for a night out on the town. In a community where most children respected their parents and were not under media-induced peer pressure to participate actively in a deceptively named fun culture of all night raves, life was easy for sensible parents whose only wish was to steer their children away from danger. But Blair's Britain is not like that. Open your eyes and ears in any shopping centre, remove yourself temporarily from your early 21st century bubble and you'll soon realise you're surrounded by technicolor, high-fidelity bullies unleashing incessant doses of none-too-subtle psychological torture. “Heh, you, you're not as cool as these dudes!". If you dare to complain about the unbearable rap beat in a clothes store or, as I did once, in a book store, expect to be either ignored or if you insist to receive a mildly reassuring talk from some lowly shop manager about marketing. In any case be in no doubt, that your aversion to a non-stop blur is your problem, not theirs.

Violence may be defined, at least according to the free dictionary bundled with my computer:

  • Behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
  • Strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force : the violence of her own feelings.
  • The unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the exhibition of such force.

Based on the latter two definitions, provocative imagery and noise intimidate as much or even more than physical force. The media like to remind us of the importance of mental health, but fail to examine their own role in adversely destabilising our sense of self. The media frequently practices another intimidatory form of violence, humiliation by association. Over the last week the media has successfully whipped up hysteria against the alleged abductor of a three year old girl on holiday in Portugal with her well-to-do parents. In the recent past we've seen masses of Sun-readers engage in animated protests, sometimes resorting to violence, against real and alleged paedophiles. Thus anyone unknown to the community at large and whose behaviour may at times seem suspect may fall victim to a paedo witch hunt. That's an awful lot of people in our atomised island state, where close-knit communities are largely a distant memory. Only a few months ago the media lynched a lonesome resident of Ipswich falsely accusing him of the murder of five prostitutes and publishing details of his MySpace activities. Should we arrest the remaining millions of alienated adults whose social life has been reduced to virtual tomfoolery. Why not arrest all those idiots on person.com who broadcast masturbation live from their Webcams? All this socially divisive fear-mongering generates intimidatory violence against anyone who fails to meet societal expectations and withdraws into an alienated existence. Violence is anything that harms people mentally or physically. No society is devoid of violence, but where conflict is minimised, so to is violence in all its forms. Otherwise psychological intimidation and alienation can soon manifest themselves physically either through self-harm, drug abuse or direct attacks against the person.

Categories
All in the Mind

In Association with Pfizer

Someone queried the other day whether any evidence linked Stanley Feldman, co-author of Panic Nation, with Spiked Online. A quick Web search reveals a number of his articles and references in the infamous GMO-promoting, pro-Nuclear, pro-Drug and pseudo-libertarian Web site. But then something caught my attention, right on the front page. Spiked Online are running a What Inspired You? event, purportedly to raise awareness of scientific innovators, but conspicuously sponsored by Pfizer, manufacturer of Viagra, Zoloft and numerous other recreational and mind-altering drugs. Some of us may recall that back in the early 1980s Frank Furedi's gang posed on the extreme left in the Revolutionary Communist Party, frequently intervening at public meetings of the somewhat larger neo-Trotskyite group the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), but focusing its recruitment drive on ambitious students. They've certainly taken some controversial stances, often geared to attract dissidents from the thinking left. Around 1987-88 they regrouped around their glossy Living Marxism magazine and simply became the Living Marxism group, later rebranded as LM Mag. However, gradually they abandoned all pretence of Marxism, whatever that meant anyway, and began to hone a line of unbridled human potential whose greatest threat was posed by a culture of fear. They jumped on the bandwaggon of activists and journalists seeking to expose media bias over the 1990s' Balkan civil war and more provocatively challenged the orthodox media's Hutu-bashing analysis of the tragic internecine Rwandan slaughter in 1994. Unlike most peace activists, they concentrated their energies not on opposing war per se, but on attacking certain biases prevalent among the wishful thinking left, e.g. UN and NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia was largely welcomed by left-leaning Guardian columnists and much reasoned opposition to the 1999 aerial bombings of Kosovo and Serbia proper swallowed much of the mainstream propaganda over the inherent evil of Serb nationalists.

Only four years later in early 2003, following military intervention in Afghanistan, millions came out on the streets to voice their opposition to the pending invasion, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was an infinitely greater thug than Slobodan Milosevic. Large sections of the thinking public had at last begun to question the emotional rhetoric over humanitarian intervention. More important, the intervention in Kosovo, sold successfully on humanitarian grounds, far from ushering in a new era of interethnic harmony and an end to ethnic cleansing, had put in power a bunch of xenophobic militants who relied on NATO troops to keep the peace and caused the exodus of tens of thousands more of Kosovans of all ethnic groups a fact the subservient British media failed to hide from the public. While NATO Had spent billions on intervention in the former Yugoslavia, it had turned a blind eye to a civil war in the newly renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo inflicting 3-4 million deaths, in the aftermath of Rwandan democide (okay pedantics here, but to call it a genocide assumes one ethnic group sought the elimination of another, while in reality the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis was more of class or caste than ethnicity). Just as the public began to question the benefits of military intervention to tackle conflicts with economic and, dare I say, environmental causes, Frank Furedi's gang seemed more preoccupied with attacking Green Fascists, health fanatics and anyone else who challenges corporate technocracy, but in a deceptively counter-current way. Thus their campaign against smoking bans appeals not only to libertarians and critical thinkers, fed up with the media's obsession with one cause among many of cancer, but also reinforces their key message that technology can always undo the damage caused by other technologies. Worried about lung cancer, well why not wait a while for technocrats to give you a new lung? Worried about the carcinogenic effects of E-numbered food additives, why not wait for the latest and greatest anti-cancer wonder drug? The future is bright, the future is .... shiny happy people consuming pharmaceutical products supported by peer-reviewed research. More disturbingly, based on personal experience in online discussions, ex-RCPers tend to belittle those who cast doubt on technocratic claims (e.g. SSRIs have greater benefits than side effects and safe for long-term use) with accusations like "loser" or words to that effect. In essence, they consider green fascists to have their own agenda, namely to deny the masses of huge technological advances.

Stanley Feldman works at University College London, whose students, a captive audience for big pharma propagandists and mainly from wealthy backgrounds, flock to Planet Organic and tend to avoid most of the junk Mr Feldman claims is relatively harmless. It would seem that the RCP brigade live in a bubble filled with paranoid health freaks, rather than in the much larger British reality where millions of happy shoppers happily fill their supermarket trolleys with TV-advertised junk and visit their GP only to receive a prescription for some of Pfizer's or GSK's most lucrative products. Maybe people are panicking for the right reasons, but thanks to so much corporate disinformation often identify the wrong targets.

Categories
Computing

Implementing an Ajax-like Interface: A Quick How-to

In the Web development world there's been a lot of buzz about an acronym many of us previously associated either with a brand of detergent or a Dutch football team. In a nutshell Asynchronous Javascript And XML means inserting new information into a Web page without reloading the whole page. Traditionally Dynamic HTML would use complex Javascripts to replace parts of a page with data that had already been downloaded or was based on user input. That's fine when managing small amounts of data, but if you needed more records from a large data source you had to make a call to the server and effectively reload the page. One common workaround used frames, but these break the unified concept of a seamlessly integrated Web interface and rely on Javascript to keep the disjointed parts together and prevent casual visitors from viewing only one frame. Whole books have been written on the wonders of Ajax, but given the ongoing state of flux in the evolution of Web browsers and competition from proprietary technologies requiring plug-ins such as Adobe's new Flex framework for Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight, many just think Ajax is more trouble than it's worth.

Surprisingly having read Christian Heilmann's excellent "Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax" it took just a little experimentation to integrate Ajax into this site, so all internal links effectively load within the same page. Consider a 1000 word article or 6000 characters embedded in HTML. This would be unlikely to occupy more than 12KB the equivalent a small compressed jpeg image. By contrast reloading the whole page with linked header graphics, stylesheets and Javascripts may require way over 100Kb and although modern browsers cache such data, they still need to check for changes on every page reload.

The first challenge in deploying Ajax is capturing the correct variant of the XMLHttpRequest object, effectively XMLHttpRequest for Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, Opera and even IE7 and ActiveX for IE5.5 and IE6 (although the latter will still work with IE7, but is disabled by default due to ActiveX's inherit vulnerabilities on the Windows platform). Only users of IE Mac 5.2 (not updated since 2001), IE 4 and the old Netscape Navigator are left out, but we have a fallback solution for this dwindling pool of users. The second is to provide valid Web links that Search engines and Ajax-incapable browsers can use.

First the Ajax script:

The first module can be applied to many projects. Basically it takes two parameters the id attribute of target element (in quotes) and the URL of the script you wish to call in the background. This may be any script, static or dynamic supported by your server. It then simply replaces the content of the target element with the content returned by the script.

/* 
Adapted from Christian Heilmann's Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax 
*/
simplexhr = {
doxhr : function( container, url ) {
   if( !document.getElementById || !document.createTextNode) {
      return;
   }
   simplexhr.outputContainer = document.getElementById( container );
   if( !simplexhr.outputContainer ){ return; }
   var request;
   try{
      request = new XMLHttpRequest();
   } catch ( error ) {
      try {
      request = new ActiveXObject( "Microsoft.XMLHTTP" );
      } catch ( error ) {
         return true;
      }
   }
   request.open( 'get', url );
   request.onreadystatechange = function() {
   if( request.readyState == 1 ) {
   simplexhr.outputContainer.innerHTML = '<h3>loading...</h3><hr /><p>Please wait while the server retrieves the requested information.</p>';
   }
   if( request.readyState == 4 ) {
      if ( /200|304/.test( request.status ) ) {
      simplexhr.retrieved(request);
      } else {
      simplexhr.failed(request);
      }
   }
   }
   request.send( null );
   return false;
   },
   
   failed : function( requester ) {
   simplexhr.outputContainer.innerHTML = '<p>Could not retrieve the requested data.</p>';
   return true;
   },
   retrieved : function( requester ) {
   var data = requester.responseText;
   simplexhr.outputContainer.innerHTML = data;
   return false;
   }
}

Strictly speaking we should use DOM scripting for the next bit, but we need workable links within the href attribute and an easily solution we can switch on and off dynamically, e.g. via browser detection to cater for those with non-Ajax-enabled browsers (practically IE5.2 Mac, IE Win < 5 and the old Netscape Navigator < 5. The simplest solution is to call the Ajax function within the onclick attribute. If Javascript is disabled the onclick attribute will be ignored. Moreover, the server can detect problematic browsers and, if the Ajax function is stored as a server-side variable, simply not include it for these browsers. In my PHP script I use a class variable $this->ajaxLink, which is set to ' onclick="ajaxLink();"' for compliant browsers and '' for others (a dwindling minority).

function ajaxLink(el) {
   remSelected();
   if (el.href!='#') {
      var script = el.href;
   }
   else { var script = el.title; }
   el.className='selected';
   var concat='&';
   if (!/?/.test(script)) { concat='?'; }
   script += concat + 'temp=1';
   simplexhr.doxhr('body-text',script);
   window.location='#head';
   return false;
}
function ajaxSearch(type) {
   if (type==2) {
      var f = document.asearch;
   }
   else {
      var f = document.search;
   }
   var w = f.searcht.value;
   var script = 'search.php?temp=1&w=' + escape(w);
   if (type==2) { 
      var sm='all';
      var rb=document.getElementsByName('smode');
      for (var i=0;i

This is called in compliant browsers with the following code:

<a onclick="ajaxLink(this);" href="/article.php?id=4567">Interesting Article</a>

The word this in parentheses refers to the current element and lets us grab and reset its attributes. First we get its href attribute and append the query string '&temp=1' so that the script only returns the article without the header, menu and footer. We also set its class to selected so it can be highlighted appropriately in the menu via the stylesheet. Lastly we set the return value to false.

Removing Inline onclick Event Handlers

We could convert this to a DOM-scripted version by adding a special attribute, ideally by assigning a special value to rel attribute such as "internal" to denote links we wish to load asynchronously in the targeted element.

<a rel="internal" href="/article.php?id=4567">Interesting Article</a>

Next we should replace our $this->ajaxLink (or the equivalent in your server-side language of choice with ' rel="internal' and use this DOM script to rewrite add the onclick event.

function addAjaxLinks() {
   var aTags=document.getElementsByTagName('a');
   for (var i=0;i<aTags.length;i++) {
      var rel=aTags[i].getAttribute('rel');
      if (rel=='internal') {
         aTags[i].onclick=function() {
         ajaxLink(this);
         return false;
      }
   }
}
window.onload=addAjaxLinks();

An additional function handles the search utility and I've yet to implement an Ajax solution for posting messages. Some might argue this solution avoids the X for XML, that would involve slightly more code and only really for long listings rather than simply pulling in data from scripts designed to return HTML.

Lastly the PHP script file would return either just the body text, if Ajax is enabled, or the whole page. Here's my solution:

<?php
include('/inc/blog.inc.php');
// If temp get variable is not set, set to 0
if (!isset($_GET['temp'])) { $_GET['temp']=0; }
// If temp equals 1 set $articleOnly parameter to true and remove
// header, menu and footer from returned script
$articleOnly = intval($_GET['temp'])===1 ? true:false;
// If mode is not set, use 'page' as default
if (!isset($_GET['mode'])) { $_GET['mode']='page'; }
// Cast the id to 0
if (!isset($_GET['id'])) { $_GET['id']=0; }
$_GET['id']=intval($_GET['id']);
// The 'Blog' class  calls all classes required 
// to build the page from a database query.
$page = new Blog($_GET['id'],$_GET['mode'],$articleOnly);
?>
Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Scientific Orthodoxy and Scientific Fact

Open letter to George Monbiot

I just read your recent piece (3 May 2007) on Alexander Cockburn's anthropogenic climate change scepticism and his reliance on one scientist. Let me first state that broadly speaking I'm with you on this one. Irrespective of our exact scientific interpretation, it seems obvious that the exponential rise in humanity's overall impact on our planet's delicate environment (consumption and population) has had some effect whose full impact only future generations will experience.

However, your approach equating climate change deniers with 9/11 truthers worries me for several reasons. The only thing the two groups really have in common is that they challenge the received wisdom as popularised by the mainstream liberal media such as the Independent and the BBC. However, let us be in no doubt the former group enjoys large backing from corporate lobbies and pitifully little support from grass roots activists, while the latter group receives only limited funding from a few isolated entrepreneurs, but much more support from a large grassroots movement including many relatives of those murdered in the 9/11 attacks. Indeed it cannot escape my attention that in another recent piece (Guardian, 6 February 2007) on the purported insanity of 9/11 truthers you favourably quoted a Counterpunch investigation to explain how intense heat caused by burning aircraft fuel could have distributed evenly along 400m long piles causing the towers to collapse vertically from the bottom rather than bend and topple at the point of collision. Indeed please just consider the long list of those who doubt the official conspiracy theory (in which Osama Bin Laden ordered 19 mainly Saudi Arabian hijackers to kamikaze passenger jets into strategic buildings of US military and financial power) includes not only David Ray Griffin, who has extensively dissected the official 9/11 report and answered just about every scientific point you have attempted to make, but also Richard Heinberg, author of the Party's Over, Democrat representative Cynthia McKinney, Michael Meacher and Andreas von Bülow, former State Secretary in the German Ministry of Defence. History teaches us that the establishment has never had a monopoly on empirical truth, but your reply to Cockburn's article focuses not on scientific analysis of substantive facts, but on suspect concepts such as “peer-reviewed†research or a scientific consensus. Peer review merely means that research has been reviewed by someone else in a position of trust employed by corporate or state institutions. Peer-reviewed research has been used to support the safety of genetically modified organisms with terminator genes, deny the side effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or claim that new behavioural categories such as ADHD have genetic or polygenic roots (cf. Jay Joseph, the Missing Gene). The overall bias of peer-reviewed research tends to reflect the vested interests and bias of its funders. Currently, biotech and pharmaceutical multinationals represent a huge lobby perfectly prepared to spend billions in funding research and public relations to sustain whatever scientific thesis suits their interests. Pitifully little research money is channelled into investigating the psychosocial causes of childhood behavioural problems or the dangers of genetically modified crops, so dissident researchers are soon lampooned as mavericks or even as conspiracy theorists, whose work has not been peer-reviewed. If you go against the grain in today's world of intermeshed corporate, state and non-governmental entities, your work simply does not get peer-reviewed, little more than an establishment rubber stamp.

Second, we should take a quick look at Alexander Cockburn's motivations. Honestly, I think he's an old-timer who sees progress in terms of extending to millions of the world's poor the same prosperity we take for granted. As a brand of commercialised libertarianism has accompanied this steady rise in material living standards, some mistakenly see progress as evolution towards society in the most enlightened middle-class enclaves of the US and Western Europe. Consider the cultural microcosm of the aspiring intellectual elite who congregate in the Starbucks where I sit at the heart of a larger Borders store. Most would almost definitely consider themselves progressives, yet all are indulging in a form of politically correct consumerism, reassured their coffee, or at least some of it, is fair trade and very aware of most of the issues you raise in your regular Guardian columns. Indeed your books are often on prominent display alongside those of Naomi Klein. They have, if you like, been peer-reviewed or rather vetted as safe for public consumption unlikely to rock any boats.

Science does matter and it is surely too important to leave to a technocratic elite in bed with a historically deceitful corporate establishment.

By all means, polemicise against climate change deniers, but please do so based on science and do not suggest that only an elite in the pay of big business and big government have a monopoly over scientific analysis. Despite all the rhetoric we hear from very mainstream political and business leaders, I do not see any abatement in orthodox economists' addiction to continuous material growth. The government are forging ahead with plans to expand airports and provide more gambling opportunities with an economy based on abstract financial, marketing and personal services nobody really needs. The same ruling elite who preach a "don't worry, be happy and trust us" philosophy, also invest millions in belittling, subverting and as a last resort criminalising dissident intellectuals. Just because some popular conspiracy theories are plainly wacky, does not mean all unorthodox perspectives should be tarnished with the same brush or are even conspiracy theories at all. Let us not forget in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair described the "war for oil" slur as a mere conspiracy theory circulating on the Internet. On 9/11 it is the establishment, not their naysayers, who entertain the public with a grotesque conspiracy theory defying the laws of physics. The establishment can no longer deny the reality of climate change, because you cannot lie very long about medium-term weather forecasts and the human impact on the environment is undeniable to all but the most hardened followers of Frank Füredi's Spiked Online sect (who incidentally agree with you on 9/11, but never mind). As for motivation, while it may seem superficially plausible that US imperialism in the Middle East may have induced a bunch of extremists to perpetrate atrocities against the civilian American population and some have hypothesised that US has been drawn into a war that it cannot win, copious evidence, which you have yourself quoted, shows that US plans to conquer the world's largest source of cheap and easy fossil fuels in the Middle East and Central Asia predates the first (Persian) Gulf War at a time when the US oil imports accounted for less 50% of domestic consumption. Their actions are entirely consistent both with their high-consumption economic model and with the peak oil scenario (which the likes of Alexander Cockburn and Greg Palast also deny). History is replete with examples of governments instigating and perpetrating atrocities against sections of their citizenry to engender a climate of war and hiding this reality from their own population. Without such levels of government deceit the huge crimes against humanity such as Nazi Holocaust or the largely forgotten forced famines in Belgian Congo, Ukraine or British occupied Bengal in 1943-44 would not have happened.

If we accept that Bush and Blair are not motivated by high humanitarian ideals such as spreading democracy and women's rights, defeating tyrants or ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction, then we have to weigh the merits of two explanations for their behaviour: the systematic pursuit of power or inherent contradictions of our current model of development. I submit that the driving force behind the current wave of imperialist conflict is ultimately the latter but inevitably engenders the former with increased levels of ferocity as supply fails to meet the growing demand for limited resources on a finite planet.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Is the Crime Rate Falling or Rising

One well-designed Website, www.anxietyculture.com seemed worthy of a link exchange request as it was publicised in the forum of another site I respect Medialens. It claims to offer an antidote to the mainstream media with a special focus on the left's favourite bête noire The Daily Mail. I particularly liked the article on 'Team spirit Means Mob Mentality', but took issue with the site's general dislike for the work ethic, while agreeing wholeheartedly that probably way over half of jobs in the UK serve no meaningful purpose other than entangling everyone in a huge web of endless corporate promotion, deception and bureaucracy. The site peddles a simplistic line placing huge optimism in the future evolution of humanity given recent cultural developments, with only overwork holding people back from realising their full creative potential. Judging from the polished bespoke Flash design, I'd assume that a good deal of work has gone into the site's presentation. It offers myriad excuses for trendy student types and layabouts to justify their lifestyle and falls into the dangerous trap of extolling the virtues of economic model centred around consumption and entertainment. That's right hundreds of thousands of UK residents work hard in offices, advertising agencies, shopping malls, bars, nightclubs and casinos so much of the remaining population can indulge in materialistic dreams that are both unsustainable and unattainable to all but a lucky few.

Among the myths that the reactionary press allegedly perpetrates is the relentless rise in domestic violence and anti-social behaviour. Quoting the British Crime Survey (BCS) Anxiety Culture claims not only is crime at an all time low and any statistical increases can be attributed to greater reporting and changing definitions, but accuses the BBC and Daily Mail of scaremongering. The same logic is applied to the overhyped obesity epidemic and again there is a good deal of common sense in the site 's observations. Britons ate on average more calories three decades ago and many otherwise healthy people have lived into their 80s and 90s despite being clinically overweight or obese based on the simplified body mass index. However, in both cases just because the corporate and state media simplify and misstate the causes of evident issues that people experience in their everyday lives does not mean these problems do not exist. All power elites have their own agendas. Certainly the spectre of pervasive antisocial behaviour and rampant crime can serve to justify new Draconian legislation expanding surveillance in one of the most heavily monitored countries in the world.

However, the trouble with crime statistics lies in the definition of crime. If crime means petty theft, then the installation of surveillance technology, the transition to electronic transactions for all but the smallest purchases and, dare I say, a relatively buoyant economy, albeit unsustainable with a widening rich-poor gap, have led to a marked reduction. Very few people in this country carry more than £50 in hard cash and if their car is worth more than a few hundred quid it probably has an alarm. Indeed people spend more and more of their time at home, watching TV and surfing the net. Look through the windows of houses and flats in working class areas and you'll see gigantic home cinemas in almost every living room. Increasingly each member of a household has a personalised media delivery system in their bedroom, leading to a further disintegration of family life. At least in the 70s and 80s when families would tend to watch prime-time TV together in the living room each member would benefit from the others' insights and collective viewing would also limit certain indulgences, especially graphic scenes of murder and rape.

The corporate and state elites consider crime any acts that endanger their grip on power and may destabilise the delicate social order that keeps the masses loyal to the system and easily manageable. Drunk youths rampaging down high streets scaring the living daylights out of any passers-by suit the elite agenda just fine. First their behaviour boosts not only the multi-billion pound booze business, but is also excellent for the booming CCTV surveillance industry and justifies incessant calls from mainstream politicians for more police on the beat. More important it lets the system keep tabs on young hooligans, so after their Saturday night brawls they can safely return to grease the wheels of a corrupt corporate machine. If the same youths had spent their weekend reading Joel Bakan's The Corporation or attending an antiwar demo, they might not act as obediently when asked to enforce new diktats (conveniently labelled as best practice guidelines). The real troublemakers the establishment worries about are not yobs of any social class, serving a useful purpose both as scapegoats and as bullies they can later disown, but conscientious independent thinkers, the kind of people who get labelled mavericks, mad professors, extremists and just plain crazies.

An act is only considered criminal in law if powerful forces have not only put it on the statute books but are actually willing to enforce it. If we redefined crime as 'harming, robbing or unduly exploiting others' and 'infringing on the basic human rights of others', then megabuck corporations that dominate the City of London would be in the dock alongside the politicians who let them move trillions of pounds, dollars and Euros across the globe to boost their bottom line with little regard to the immense human consequences. Indeed in the UK the kind of lobbying that led to the trial in absentia of former Italian PM Bettino Craxi and arrest of his successor Silvio Berlusconi is perfectly legal. Whether the state is minimally concerned about the harm caused by toxic effluents produced by industry essential to our high consumption lifestyle depends largely on its analysis of the effects pollution has on social and economic stability. The establishment wish both to command the loyalty of its subjects through its public image of benevolence and needs workers and consumers to be healthy enough to participate in their business model. In recent decades the establishment in much of Western Europe and North America has been able to clean up its act on industrial pollution by outsourcing most of the really dirty jobs to low wage economies.

Whether you believe the BCS or the (in my humble opinion) more realistic picture painted in Francis Gilbert's Yob Nation, a true measure of social cohesion cannot be based on abstract crime statistics, but on people's selfishness or rather their propensity towards psychopathy. I don't care if my neighbour downloads gigabytes of copyrighted music, fails to pay her taxes or smokes an illicit substance as long as this behaviour does not affect my basic dignity. Some would have us believe as a result of such transgressions musicians would stop recording new albums because peer-to-peer file sharing has put them out of business, the state would fail to provide basic social services because nobody pays taxes or we'd be plagued with rampant cannabis-induced psychosis. In the real world record companies and pop stars make billions out of a select group of high profile acts, tax evasion by ordinary citizens accounts for a minuscule percentage of potential government income and psychosis induced by other perfectly legal drugs such as alcohol is a much greater problem than the latest potent strains of cannabis. What concerns me is whether my neighbour respects my personal dignity and participates as a conscientious member of the local community. If people distrust their neighbours, indeed are encouraged by the scaremongering media to regard any deviant behaviour with suspicion, then they owe allegiance only to themselves, possibly their immediate family, and remote entities such as their employer, musical or cinematographic idols, favourite sports team, nation, special interest sect, religion or even a supranational organisation, but not to their geographic community. Increasingly people feel they have less in common with their neighbours than they do with distant cyberbuddies, so it's no wonder that we care less about the welfare of other members of our community. Despite the oft-repeated rhetoric of mainstream politicians a combination of economic and cultural trends have led to the steady corrosion not just of traditional extended families, but communities. Much of the media attention given to domestic violence, antisocial behaviour and paedophilia serve not only to spread fear and distrust, but more importantly to assert the role of a vast state and corporate control structure, comprising police, social workers, psychiatric nurses and increasingly non-governmental organisations such as abnormal personality (aka mental health) charities. Recent initiatives such as parenting lessons for begetters of antisocial children and the extension of the definition of domestic assault to include verbal abuse fit wonderfully into this pattern. Children growing up in the late 1990s and early 21st century lack the respect that previous generations had for their primary caregivers, learning early on of their parents' fallibility, e.g. Mummy why are you smoking? Don't you know it's bad for you? or Daddy, you can't send me to bed at nine o'clock, that's child abuse!

A fairer measure would be the extent of social and personal injustice. With such a pervasive network of CCTV cameras it comes as little surprise that many forms of visible theft and disorderly behaviour have shown a steady decline since the early 1990s. Criminals have simply become smarter turning to credit card identity theft, loan extortion rackets for the heavily indebted and supplying technically illegal recreational mind drugs such as ecstasy, often tacitly tolerated by the establishment. Fear of reprimand has certainly changed the way husbands and parents behave. Rather than expressing their true feelings they will often act out scenes they have witnessed in movies and TV soap operas, resorting to antidepressants and other drugs to cope with their inability to assert their role at home, or simply distancing themselves from the family. So statistical reductions in the perception of crime as reported by the government-sponsored BCS do not necessarily mean greater social tranquillity and reciprocal trust, but merely reflect the effectiveness of the government's chosen means of controlling the populace. As the establishment only cares about maintaining its tight grip over the plebs, it favours measures that boost profitability and surveillance, while atomising and marginalising the population at large and destroying traditional allegiances to local communities and faith groupings. Moral criminality is inherent in a society like ours that worships consumerism encouraging long-term debt, is hooked on soaps, violence-packed movies and with large proportions of the youth regularly playing first-person shooter games and indulging in binge drinking and gambling.

Recent legal changes have effectively outlawed traditional safety valves for pent-up anxiety such as having a ciggy and shouting at your spouse, while making it easier to get inebriated 24/7 and then blow a fortune on a night at the casino, whose extortionate operations would have been illegal only two years ago. The big criminals have been given free reign, able either to bankroll lobbies or circumvent new surveillance technology, while the little criminals are treated like naughty kids and sent to the head teacher to take their medication.

Categories
All in the Mind

Something’s Changed

Thoughts on Michael Bywater's Big Babies or Why Can't We Just Grow Up

Originally prepared for a talk and discussion at the South Place Ethical Society Book Club.

Why do people seem to behave differently these days? Why do young girls appear to be more interested in sex? Why do young boys appear to be more restless and inattentive? Why do so many adults comport themselves like overgrown children, always eager to indulge in new high-tech toys or score with members of the opposite or indeed of the same sex as if they were playing for the primary school football team? If our sole guide is the biogenetic theory for the development of personalities, then presumably these expressions of human behaviour have always been with us, just undiagnosed or unnoticed in other times. But maybe, our behaviour has changed because our society has too. One recent BBC-publicised book on the Invention of Childhood by Hugh Cunningham suggests that this phase in life is a mere social construct, building on Neil Postman's much more serious and insightful 1986 book, The Disappearance of Childhood, in which he concluded "If all the secrets of adulthood are opened to children, cynicism, apathy or ignorance replace curiosity for them." One may argue that childhood and adulthood have not so much disappeared as merged with the former losing its innocence and the latter its responsibility. If the progressive end of childhood labour in the 19th century ushered in an era of playful childhood and mass schooling before entry into the workforce in one's mid to late teens, today this transition into the adult world has been both blurred and extended. American author, John Taylor Gatto, himself a teacher until 1991, has extensively documented how the expansion of state education has transformed the crucial early part of our development as a huge social engineering project thwarting creativity and artificially extending childhood way into our twenties and beyond. Indeed of the average 102 waking hours US children spend 56 hours glued to mass electronic entertainment, chiefly TV and video games, and 36 hours at school leaving only 10 hours for independent development. In the 1950s and 60s John Bowlby, a renowned pedagogue and child psychiatrist still respected today, though I believe widely misunderstood, demonstrated in his works on attachment theory the importance of early bonding with the primary caregiver ­paving the way for a smooth transition into early socialisation experiences. Over the last fifty years we've seen not only an increase in the percentage of household units with two working parents or a single parent with a commensurate rise in the provision of day care, but also in the impact of consumer culture on child development. Whether these trends necessarily go hand in hand is open to debate. Certainly the predominant role of mothers in child care in civilisations spanning the globe stems partly from biology and partly from historically higher infant mortality rates and shorter life spans, meaning married women spent much of their adult lives either as procreators or as caregivers. These observations are by no means unique to Bywater, with a plethora of sociological commentary emanating the belly of the Anglo-American beast. Books such the "The Other Parent" by Joseph Steyer giving an insider's perspective on the workings of the video game and children's TV business and Toxic Childhood by Sue Palmer, reasserting the crucial role that parenting plays in childhood development and offering a counterbalance to the current emphasis on genetically determined personality and learning disorders, both attack the same underlying issues of infantilisation of adulthood. Oliver James, himself the subject of much derision by the growing psychiatric support sector, for reasons that will soon become apparent, recently wrote a book describing the myriad stress factors and psychological problems people face in one succinct word, Affluenza. Oliver James goes out of his way to ally himself with the trendy left on most lifestyle issues, but clearly his findings point to the same diagnosis of what is wrong with our society. Once our basic living needs have been met, it is largely family and society rather than material possessions that determine happiness. If a society values materialism and aesthetics more than social cohesion and authenticity then many of its members are doomed to feel forever unsatisfied. One can only cringe at the NHS offering treatment for gambling addiction as if it were a disease when the environmental causes are so obvious to all but the most hardened evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker.

We bear witness to media-induced early sexualisation [the average age at which girls have their first period has fallen from 16-17 in the mid 19th century to just 11-12 today (Average age at menarche in various cultures )], Reality TV both exposing and trivialising people's psychological weaknesses, broken marriages and a nanny-state philosophy. Combined all these trends promote the intervention of teachers, social workers and other so-called professionals into the lives of families deemed dysfunctional and serve to undermine the authority of parents, who are increasingly infantilised through the identification of their psychological weaknesses such as manic depression. This belittling of mother- and fatherhood, complete with parenting lessons and TV edutainment programmes on dysfunctional families, remove much of the innocence of our pre-teen years that once gave way to a gradual period of discovery with emotional equilibrium built around stable personal relationships and hard work as the most likely outcomes for those afforded sufficient opportunities. It would be unfair to cast our eyes back to the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Every epoch brings with it a new set of social injustices and contradictions, but rising material and aesthetic expectations have made us some of the hardest to please.

Bywater's book has certainly made some readers cringe with horror, but has made many others laugh tearfully. He details with insightful clarity how we are all treated as babies not only by government agencies, but equally by advertisers and the corporate media eager to tempt us with their wares and trivial pursuits. It's not just the spin put on everything by the government, it's the lies that we're told, day in day out, in the hope and expectation that we'll remain compliant and not ask any awkward questions. Our life is lived in a miasma of catchy jingles, branding and a succession of scare stories, so that we will place our trust in the very people who instilled fear into us in the first place.

Critiques

Many Guardian-reading, politically correct, health and safety freaks would dismiss this book as a mere Daily Mail rant, camouflaged only by its literary excellence. But perhaps they didn't get as far as page 19 in which Bywater writes "There is, in Great Britain, an entire newspaper devoted to ranting (The Daily Mail) and in America an entire industry, (the media). But declaring that things are not what the were, and that changes means worse, is as old as the hills.". Indeed much of the liberal intelligentsia believes it suffices to criticize someone with the recalcitrant Middle England press to defeat an argument. Such comparisons do little justice to the calibre of the social critique occasionally permitted to raise its ugly head in the Daily Mail, admittedly alongside patriotic nonsense, scare stories about terrorist immigrants plot to invade this island and celebrity gossip, when compared with the sheer chutzpah of the cruise missile leftists cum Blairite apologists given free reign in the Guardian and Independent. These so-called left gatekeepers of permissible thought like to define what it is left and therefore good what it is right and therefore evil and reactionary, and I'm thinking in particular of Polly Toynbee, Johann Hari (infamous not only for his support for the invasion of Afghanistan but also for his vociferous advocacy of MDMA or ecstasy), David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen. They often build a reputation on the student left on largely lifestyle issues, often exposing the duplicity of establishment figures many of us love to hate and then, when push comes to shove over some geopolitical issue of primary strategic importance to our ruling elite, they support their government citing humanitarian motives. The last-named individual, Nick Cohen, has recently published a book denouncing the left for not supporting the allied liberation of Iraq and accusing them in not too polite words of siding with reactionary Jew-baiting, Holocaust-denying Islamic fundamentalists. Sadly while many on the left understand the true economic causes of recent conflicts, many feel uneasy about such high-profile associations with any official enemy du jour portrayed as the latest reincarnation of Hitler. As Bywater opines in the closing paragraphs of Chapter 11 on the Mummyverse:

"It's your own fault for not bracing up! But we don't listen either, otherwise we would surely have risen in the streets before now. I know very few people who do not feel deeply disenfranchised by the current political system. Most of us feel we are not being listened to. But after the fury — whichever side you were on — that Parliament or public demonstrations over the invasion of Iraq were simply ignored, most of us have also retreated into a sullen impotence. We have had our tantrum. We have screamed. 'Not fair!' LISTEN TO ME! Won't! Shan't! You MUSTN'T! and have been sent back to the nursery."

... by the likes of Johann Hari and Nick Cohen, I hasten to add. Now let us consider reactions to the much publicised announcement of Britain's first Supercasino in Manchester. Only the reactionary Daily Mail, described affectionately by trendy lefties as the Grumpy Old Men's rag, featured a powerful condemnation of government policy (with Roy Hattersley of all people exposing the sheer criminality of New Labour's domestic and foreign policy) putting social values before the profit motive, while the Sun and Guardian, both of whose editorial teams are neolabourite to the hilt, gave the move much more favourable coverage. Indeed last Sunday's Observer's leader contained yet another eulogy for the mendacious master of sound-bites under the title "Let Mr Blair Get On With his Job". Why should we trust the Observer to tell us what to think? Are the individuals co-opted onto its editorial board not treating us gullible wishful thinking pseudo-intellectuals as insolent children who need to brought back into the fold?

Consider this gem:

! According to an AP-AOL Games poll, 40 per cent of American adults play games on a computer or a console, and 45 per cent play over the Internet. More than a third of online gamers spent more than $200 last year on gaming. Associated Press, 9 March 2005).

In practice, a new species has evolved in fewer than 20 years. The very fact millions of Anglo-Americans define themselves as gamers speaks volumes about our culture, or precisely the tight grip that the giga-buck entertainment industry has on the collective psyche.

Critical Acclaim

Stephen Law, author of The War For Children's Minds, asks us in the Guardian book review to "Think of it rather as a post-mortem carried out with surgical precision on the corpse of any pretensions that we might have had of being grown ups". I think there is much merit in his conclusion:

"How much of what we see in Bywater's mirror is real, and how much due to its distorting effect? As the anecdotes about children forced to wear safety goggles to play conkers or BBC staff being advised on how to use revolving doors start to accumulate, so we begin to see ourselves transform into gurgling babies."

"Is this reflection accurate? What is true is that, back in the 50s, when Bywater supposes we really were grown-ups, we were not so addicted to instant gratification. And we were treated more like adults too. But we could be infantile in other ways. Our views on authority, social position (divinely determined) and role (mummy: behind the stove) were often child-like"

"On balance, are we more child-like now, or less? I don't believe Bywater's accumulation of anecdotes is well-placed to settle the matter. Which is not to say that it is not both thought-provoking and amusing. It is."

Frothy Cafeinated Milk in a Training Beaker

Consider, if you will, the expressive power condensed into a succinct comparison between Italian and Anglo-Saxon coffee drinkers, neatly arranged into a user-friendly bold-faced text box complete with a warning symbol on page 65 of the hardback edition.

"See the sophisticated person drinking her small ristretto at a pavement café in the morning sun. Now see the AmeriBrit, clutching a cardboard pail of fluffy frothy milk dusted with NutraSweet, sucked through a Suc-U-Like lid spout, like a toddler's training beaker, and believing himself a sophisticate. (The soul-sucking Starbucks now has instructions on how to order your coffee. Coming soon: Why Despite Everything You Should Try to Enjoy It or You Will Get a Smack. We apologise for the inconvenience, Have a Good Day.)"

As an aside the Suk-U-Like trade name may seem veridical, but the author invented it probably to test the reader's credulity. Had anyone noticed how in the space of a little more than a decade, everything virtual, or rather with no physical existence, has been prefixed by the infantile first person possessive pronoun, my. Suddenly a location on a hard drive is referred by one monopolistic software vendor as 'My Documents' and a popular social networking Website is known as 'My Space'. I hear people refer to 'My Outlook' and 'My MSN' when they mean bug-ridden overpriced proprietary software installed on their machine over which they have amazingly little control (and which also have perfectly functional open-source alternatives). Refreshingly for me at least, Bywaters nearly always calls specimens of our species people, apparently unaware of 'best practise' diktats that hereinafter said subjects are to be known as individuals.

Everyone Gawping at Screens

Bywater's Franco-Latinate pretentiousness under the subtitle "Tempora Mutantur, Plus c'est la même chose" asks us to consider what most office workers do these days:

"Walk around any great city towards dusk on a winter's afternoon — the lights coming on in the offices, people at their desks, unaware of being watched, or possibly all too aware of being watched, glad of it, happy to be observed being ratified, vouched for, significant, employed. Ignore the signs on the big glass doors boasting of telecommunications or corporate law, services to the food industry, public transport consortia, web consultancies, outsourcing consultancies, debt management consultancies, .. ignore them. Just look at the people. Two things spring to mind.

  1. What on earth are they actually doing?

  2. Whatever it is, they are all doing the same thing.

    And what they are doing - when we all grew up it would all be different — is gawping.

Indeed Bywater leaves much to the imagination. Here is a huge corporate bureaucracy employing millions of office workers to gawp at screens in a drive to seek new ways to manage the system so that manufacturing costs can be driven down and sales boosted. But the author's anger at corporate hegemony surfaces three pages later, page 203 I believe:

"Companies demand terrible loyalty but respond with unutterable capriciousness; senior managers — who believe that management is a noun [as an aside a colleague of mine showed me a book she had read titled Project Management in the Real World after UCL had paid for her to attend a conference on the subject], not a verb, a state, not a process; a purpose, not an adjuvant to purposes — arrive, shriek for a space in the corporate playpen, disgrace themselves and depart, rewarded, to do it again elsewhere. Meanwhile, the middle ranks and below must learn to live with the knowledge that loyalty is a one-way street, and that their job is to comply, to feign enthusiasm at every fatuous new 'initiative', to swallow the latest mission statement, to spout the pre-emptive corporate jargon of the 'ever-changing world' and 'cutting-edge technology' and 'scalable solutions' and 'fast-paced business environment' and everything else imaginable (and much that is not). The corporation is a giant bully, frantic and selfish, and, just like the bully in the schoolyard, has no real idea what it wants its underlings to do, except to comply. To comply, and ... to suck it up when they have to go."

Irony

Bywater's sense of irony rises in tone as he addresses the thorny issue of health and safety. In my experience if you want to justify a policy without too much discussion, just claim that is 'best practice' or is in line with latest guidelines on 'health and safety'. These excuses have been used for anything from the enforcement of expensive proprietary Microsoft or Oracle software packages, favouring one vendor over others, to overpackaging (Morrison's justified wrapping coconuts in clingfilm on the grounds of hygiene) or the outsourcing of routine maintenance tasks like changing lightbulbs. This is because the consultants who draw up the 'best practice' guidelines at great expense to the tax payer, as detailed in David Craig's excellent exposé Plundering the Public Sector, also represent huge multinationals with vested interests in the maintenance of the quasi monopoly. As a temporary contract analyst programmer at University College London I had to attend a 2 hour health and safety presentation, which seemed about as informative as your average pre-flight emergency landing drill.

"Picture a great European capital city in the 21st century. Look down. What do you see? Not holes, I imagine, unguarded holes, holes with men in them, men not wearing any protective clothing, (no hard hats, no Kevlar-toed work boots, no luminous high-visibility jackets, no ear defenders, no safety glasses), holes not properly demarcated with proper exclusion zones and proper cones and barriers and signs and tapes; holes with pedestrians — the general public, untrained — can cross via planks no thicker than a plank from which the untrained general public (who have carried out no risk assessment, received no site induction ,briefing or toolbox talk, signed no access permit) could fall, if jostled by another member of the general public, into the unguarded hole and on top of one of the men-not-wearing-any-protective-clothing."

"Look up, too; and I bet, in your mind's eye, there are no projecting girders, loosely dangling high voltage cables held together with duct tape, no curling, razor sharp pieces of corrugated iron, no filed-down-pointed-brackets poised at you'll-have-someone's-eye-out-with-that height. You won't be thinking of the sparks flying from the angle grinders grinding metal on the pavement, of the hammering and welding and flying dust and brick-grit, the motorcycles on the pavement, the broken paving stones, the pavement itself suddenly stopping and decanting you into the street of the not one- or two- but apparently three-way traffic, defeating the laws of space-time."

"Welcome to Athens 2004. Whether or not people get hurt more in Athens than in London or Minneapolis, Nottingham or San Diego or Stockholm, is not immediately discoverable. But what seems to happen is an odd kind of vigilance; an autonomous regard for self and others kicks in. People's eyes are constantly in motion, like fighter pilots'. Instead of being cocooned in iPoddage, bumbling through their protected environment like carefree children wrapped in auditory cotton wool, people in Athens are alert, watching the city above their eyeline for things about to drop on them, watching the ground beneath them for things to avoid tripping over or falling into. When nothing can be taken for granted (the quiet back street may at any moment swing round a corner, past an unguarded crane hoisting insecure pianos, and become an urban motorway, a precipitous gully, or just stop altogether) the primary skill of the citizen is expecting the unexpected."

Having lived in neighbouring Italy for ten years I can only confirm the paradox that the very European countries with the least respect for politically correct decrees on health and safety, have the longest life expectancy, 2000 more Italians may die in car accidents every year than in the UK (5000 compared with just over 3000), but fewer die as a result of bad diet, eating disorders and or alcohol-induced absent mindedness. I recall raising the issue of in-car safety with Italian friends in the early 90s and encountering the almost universal belief that seat belts impede emergency exits when vehicles veer into roadside ditches or canals.

On paedophilia Bywater risks courting controversy and I fear many over-sensitised souls may misinterpret his musings as implicit approval of adult-child gang bangs.

"Paedophilia is the modern Satan. We see it everywhere. It is the one crime for which we hold the tacit — or often vociferous — belief that rehabilitation is not possible. And in a sense it exemplifies everything that has gone awry in our way of thinking about sex; everything that is infantilised."

Indeed in the eyes of an ultra-pc gatekeeper Bywater digs his grave deeper in a footnote on page 189 of the hardback edition:

"Actually paedophiles are completely harmless, driven by 'philia' (--), the asexual brotherly love which motivates some of our finest teachers. It's pederasts we should watch out for; theirs is 'erastés' (--), the desire to posses and consume."

This pedantic explanation of the etymology and semantics of a word whose prevalence in the mass media has risen exponentially over the last decade - I think at age of sixteen, I would probably interpreted the meaning of paedophile literally - invites us to reconsider the difference between love and exploitation. Apparently according to the media, we cannot be trusted to show the former without being accused of malicious intent to engage in the latter.

Tarred with Misogyny

Pat Kane, a Glaswegian musician of Hue and Cry fame and author of the Play Ethic, critiques the book in the Independent as the "Grumbulist Manifesto", but then goes straight to the point of his objection to this vehement attack on the sacred cows of political correctness, claiming that for Michael Bywater "apparently, Mother is to blame". Pat Kane no doubt referred to Chapter 11 "Mummy is Everywhere, and Mummy can see you", which leads, without citing evidence other than biased interpretations of thoroughly satirical prose, to his concluding words "On and on goes the systemic misogyny, and you're wondering at which point Bywater becomes aware of his own problem." Before we reach this anticlimactic accusation of misogyny we are entertained with a psychoanalysis of the author. "Woven through the argument is enough biography to explain some of Bywater's rage. This is a baby-boomer who loathes the consumerism, infantilism and irresponsibility of his generation, partly because he seems to have liberally partaken of it himself. He's designed silly computer games; he's abandoned his child to 'find himself' in an affair; he can fly a light aircraft, but still has to wear an ostentatious pilot's watch to show everyone he can."/p>

No doubt Pat Kane is coolness incarnate devoid of psychological hangups, but probably dislikes Bywater's satirically crafted thesis because it challenges his own 'Play Ethic' manifesto advocating the spread of fun culture to every place of work, which might work fine if everyone worked in a creative design agency. Yes there are new media agencies where young programmers will take a mid afternoon break to indulge in a moronic networked first person shooter game, only to continue work for their ultra-cool Armani-jeans-clad bosses until 9pm. Pleasure and entertainment are of course relative concepts. If you work hard all day long at a mundane but socially useful task, you may enjoy relaxing in front of a TV movie or having sociable drink at your local and then feel reinvigorated for another day in the service of humanity. But I don't know how we could apply Kane's Play Ethic to paramedics or workers in the Chinese semiconductor factory that produces components for branded mp3 players. By contrast someone raised on a constant diet of sensory hedonism or , as Jean Baudrillard would define it, simulacra, essentially an update of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, would inevitably feel estranged with the absence of constant audio-visual stimulation in the form of fast-beat pop music, flashing imagery and exciting action. Miraculously some of us actually enjoy our jobs, play and work merge into one as our creative exploits yield results that others not only appreciate, but benefit the community as a whole. Alas individual creativity has little place in a society controlled by concentrated political and economic leviathans that despise intellectualism.

Kane's suggestion that "David Cameron's back-room wonks would undoubtedly endorse" Bywater's "distaste for the increasing regulation of daily life" is a classic example of guilt by association. As Pat Kane probably retains some faculty for critical thinking, it may one day dawn on him that much of what he considers healthy entertainment is part of a massive social engineering experiment that renders us subservient to none other than the entertainment industry forever preoccupied with our failure to emulate the coolness of media-generated role models, a cause, as Oliver James notes in Affluenza, of much emotional distress. In many ways Pat Kane's Play Ethic, dedicated 'To the Net' with the byline, 'She's everything 2 me' (in which the preposition to is spelled in the same way as its numeric homophone), is antithetical to Bywater's delightful rant. Kane makes a case for an indefinite extension of childhood play, but clearly fails in over 350 trendily illustrated pages to realise the full extent of mass media manipulation, merely seeing Naomi Klein's No Logo movement as an encouraging counterbalance to branded culture. Maybe he only felt the need to pay lip service to Naomi Klein's rejection of corporate culture because of her status within the advertising industry, in whose milieu Kane hobnobs. I've seen this book on the book prominently displayed on the bookshelves of two design agencies where I've worked. Incidentally Kane's book benefited from the graphic creativity of sugarfreedesign. We may think of play as unproductive creativity, undoubtedly an essential ingredient in any child's development, increasingly submerged by highly structured virtual worlds that only multi-billion enterprises can successfully create and market. In the bygone age when people had lives, but not lifestyles as Bywater notes in a short biography of his late father, most of our adult lives were engaged in productive pursuits, whether at home or at work. In post-industrial societies like post-modern Cool Britannia, only a minority of workers are employed directly or indirectly in the production of goods or provision of services essential to living. Both the public and private sectors are dominated by project managers, clerical staff, information technology support staff, consultants, accountants, lawyers and various guises of assistants. The only people who apparently do anything useful these days tend to provide catering, plumbing and house maintenance services to workers too busy managing the system to have a clue how to make the building blocks of the society on which we all depend. One wonders how Kane would have dismissed the lessons of the prescient movie, the Great Rock and Roll Swindle, and I say that as someone who cycled to the nearest HMV store to purchase my copy of God Shave the Queen back in 1977.

Big Parent

But let us sample some of the evidence, where Bywater controversially likens Big Brother with Big Mother. Bywater did not coin the latter term, which prompted Kane's accusation of misogyny. As the online Double-tongued Dictionary of English slang notes:

"Big Mother n. a government attempting to exercise total control over the well-being of its citizens; parents attempting to constantly monitor or control the activities of their children, especially by means of electronic devices.â€ÂÂ

Bywater chose big mother rather big parent or big father because it rhymes with Big Brother, itself a gender-specific metaphor for an omni-present oligarchy that is not necessarily composed solely of males. But what gems did Bywater include in his chapter on the Mummyverse that vexed editorial staff at the Independent:

"it's the ultimate statement of power. As we've already mentioned, in early 2006, the British Government, under the very peculiar Tony Blair, attempted to shovel something called the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill through Parliament which would, if unchecked, have given them the power to pass laws without the frightful inconvenience of consulting Parliament, that shabby and disobliging collective of elected representatives."

"Had they been more honest, they would have simply called the Because I Say So Bill and we would have known where we stood. As it was, people were surprised to discover the extraordinary and unabashedly anti-democratic provisions buried in a Bill that the government did all it could to present as a model of plodding dullness, which history indicates, is generally the method by which dictators come into power, and so they knobbled it while they still had the chance."

"Mr Blair was, of course, being a bad Mother, simultaneously treating the lot of us like Big Babies, and behaving like an ever bigger one himself. But rather than thinking that egregious and peculiar, we might consider it as the root of the problem: that the people who wish to infantilise us are, if anything, even less grown-up than we are, and so their version of Mummy, is an insecure tyrannical, manipulative fishwife, a sort of older sibling irritating Mummy in order to be able to boss the younger ones around, and whose response to any problem is to lash out, shrieking — and not just in the political arena."

"Big Babies like nothing more than throwing their weight around, and in politics, the best way to do that is to ban things: junk food and fizzy drinks, end-of-exam parties at university, car advertisements which show people driving fast, knives, smoking, mobile-phone pornography, Australian wood which might have bugs in, consensual sadomasochist sex, seeds, unlicensed church fétes, beef, cloning, euthanasia... like a dog licking its privates, they do it because they can; and the same mechanism applies to the increasing web of surveillance inflicted on citizens on both sides of the Atlantic."

"Surveillance — data collection, phone tapping, monitoring and any other preferably undetectable and high-tech method for invading people's privacy — is the absolute highest good that governments can imagine. Mummy wants to keep an eye on Baby all the time, and, while the innocent (as they always say) have nothing to fear, we should all fear the rapidity with which a government (even without the Because I Say So act) can redefine the word guilty. As Cardinal Richelieu said 'Give me six lines written by the most honest man and I will find something in them to hang him'. As Cardinal Richelieu might have added: 'But I won't tell him what it is he is being hanged for'. The infantilised, after all, do not have enough rights to participate in their own governance. Their duty is merely to comply, and who has not been told by an irate parent: 'If you don't know what you've done, then I'm not telling you?"

"Once getting the knock on the door at 4am, being pulled out of the line for questioning, being turned away at the boarding gate, having documents demanded — Papiere bitte — or just simply disappearing, were marks of a police state. Now they are becoming increasingly common in the English-speaking West, in the form of immigration authorities responding to hysteria about 'the Other' in our midst, or police enforcing a protest-free cordon sanitaire around Parliament, or little old ladies being told they can't bring their knitting needles onto aeroplanes in case they overpower the pilots, or mysterious unmarked 'rendition' flights touching down in the dark."

If we skip a few paragraphs, Bywater resumes his tongue-in-cheek analogies dabbling in psychobabble:

"Looking at how politicians behave we might well conclude that they, too, are built on the Asperger's model. All too often their social behaviour seems carefully learnt; they seem curiously like a dog shaking hands — it's not that it doesn't do it quite well, just that it has no idea at all what it's for or why we do it. When we hear a Bush or Blair make a joke to lighten the atmosphere, we also hear some inner dialogue box opening in their brain: Tell ... Joke .. Lighten .. At-mos-phere .. Click <OK> to con-ti-nue or <CANCEL> to can-cel. When they play the air guitar to show the regular guys they are, what they actually show is a certain semiotic ineptitude, since they usually give the odd effect of having had lessons. Not guitar lessons, but air guitar lessons,"

"Now they are not Asperger's people. Nobody with Asperger's Syndrome would even contemplate the world of politics, dependent on schmoozing and dissembling, a world of words where a talent for ambiguity is the prerequisite of success. Yet see them in the mass and they are clearly in some way differently wired, and the only plausible explanation is that they have rewired themselves. Overwhelmed with a terrible neediness, these unpopular ones at school at school now desperate to get their own back, have stopped listening to what they themselves say in case it stops them in their tracks, and have lost the ability to listen to anyone else, except in the most calculating way, just as some men know that if you listen to a woman until two in the morning, she will go to bed with you."

As an aside, I might add that had Bywater done his research more methodically, then he might have concluded that the recent invention of Asperger's Syndrome is another example of the way Big Mother, in the guise of the psychiatric establishment, infantilises us with new labels as a means of gaining greater control over our lives. If we skim some of the humoristic generalisation, the litany of actions and objects politicians have considered banning reveals a libertarian laissez-faire bias that risks benefiting the very rampant hedonism that motivated Bywater's anti-consumerist sermons in other parts of the book. But then we should hardly expect luxury car advertisers to do anything but extol the most appealing virtues of their wares and we cannot cease to be amazed by a two-headed establishment, one encouraging us to gamble, booze, play moronic games and hop on cheap flights to exotic locations and the other regulating and banning many of these same activities. One legitimate criticism of the Grumpy Old Men's manifesto is its failure to spell out these obvious contradictions. If you want to enjoy dirt cheap flights to partake in an extended pub crawl, should you marvel at the way you're treated like an overgrown teenager. Likewise, one should not demand a refund from the management of an all-night discotheque because one objects to the noisy ecstasy-ridden atmosphere. If you want a pleasant relaxing evening away from the riff-raff, book a table for two at a posh upmarket restaurant. Likewise if you demand a minimum of respect from airline staff and have a couple of grand to spare, consider splashing out on a business class ticket. I've nearly always travelled economy class and until one memorable occasion had grown accustomed to my diminished status as a low-margin customer. I had to stand in for the sales manager of an Italian engineering firm and was booked on a first class flight to Delhi. I was treated almost like royalty, almost feeling inconvenienced by the flight assistants' persistent preoccupation with my well-being.

Sweet Talk

Kelly Smith interviewed Michael Bywater in a more favourable light, admittedly as a journalist and one of his former students. Ms Smith correctly applies a concluding phrase of Chapter 12 to the author himself. "Whenever we read something, we should ask ourselves: 'Who wrote this? And why?' And we should then try and imagine the circumstances of its composition. So why Big Babies and why now?â€ÂÂ

"Good question. There is a whole constellation of complaints that people make: nanny state; notices ticking us off; regulations; the encroachment on our position as clients of the government. There was a time when the government were there under our sufferance; with the current government it looks as though we are allowed to be citizens under their sufferance. There has been a radical change in the attitude of the government particularly in the United Kingdom and USA.â€ÂÂ

"And we are whining about all sorts of things: people eating hand burgers in the streets; consumerism; grown-ups wandering around in nylon shorts and baseball caps; men not shaving"

Michael Bywater can admittedly come across as a tad supercilious. Asked about his use of the word neoteny, he informs us:

"Well, neoteny is really very interesting. It's where the adult retains the characteristics of the child. Now evolutionary theory says we are physically 'neotenous' apes. I think emotionally, psychologically and politically we are becoming neotenous people — characteristics of infantilism persisting in to what we laughingly call adulthood — and it does explain the underlying, or one of the underlying, causes of an awful lot of people's complaints about society."

Contrary to claims made by his detractors, Mr Bywater does not believe in some mythical golden age or as he spins it:

"We are told what to think. We are talked down to. We are distracted with colour and movement, patronised, spoon-fed, our responses pre-empted and our autonomy eroded with a fine, rich, heavily funded contempt. We are surrounded by a sea of faces: a roaring ocean of voices, speaking to us in baby talk. And we don't quite notice it"

Baby talk?

"Well, we move through the world in the face of constant noise", Bywater explains, "Of "do this', don't do that", 'fill this in', remember your position is contingent on someone else's approval, 'œwe're keeping an eye on you', 'don't walk there!', 'careful! you might trip up!', 'mind the gap', 'don't do that, don't do that', 'coffee may be hot!', 'Please leave the lavatory as you would hope to find it'. Bywater casts his eye across the room and points to a sign outside. "What does it mean when all these notices are everywhere? 'Bus lane cameras,' why? What does that mean? And another one: '24 hour CCTV.' Great! Hello! I'm on television!"

Bywater agrees that both American and British literary fiction have gone a long way to examine the state of our culture in these terms. He discussed the dystopian worlds of George Orwell's 1984, Don DeLillo's White Noise and, more recently, J.G. Ballard's Kingdom Come. So has a non-fiction investigation been long overdue? And is this particular "Lost World a lost cause? A dystopia?"

"Is it a lost world?" Was there a time when democracy worked and the people's voice was heard?" asks Bywater lighting a cigarette, " You'd have to be a better historian than I am to answer that."

"However, the idea of an infantilised or controlled population has long been a theme in literary discourse. Looking back to Greek tragedy, Bywater traces parallels with the predicament we now find ourselves in:

"Go back to Aeschylus and the Oresteia. It starts with an infantilised people at the mercy of some kind of divine, retributive, disproportionate, so-called justice and it moves towards a negotiated, grown up society. What seems to be happening now is we are going back - the Eumenides are coming back up from under the ground and they are getting us, they are in Westminster playing guitar and saying "we're just like you are.' I don't know about long overdue: it seems about due."

"So I don't think it is a dystopia; it's a sort of pre-emptive utopia. In an odd sense we are offered all these things that will make everything lovely. Alain de Botton speaks of "status anxiety", but I think we mistake, not status for happiness, but the symbol for the status it symbolises. So we have a signifier/signified confusion. We live in a state of terrible semiological angst and it may be because the only model we have for anything now is business, and at the core of business is the idea of marketing and advertising."/p>

When Kelly smith suggested that "if we read the human body as a text we are almost walking, talking, living, breathing advertising hoardings —— dripping head to toe in designer labels - and by carrying our Starbucks coffees around we are personally promoting the product", Bywater elucidated:.

"You are absolutely right, but the odd thing is we think we acquire status by doing it. The great mystery which I devoted a whole chapter to, but then removed, is the designer t-shirt: the t-shirt with the logo on of someone who made the t-shirt. Why does someone walk around wearing a t-shirt with "I don't know" Tommy Hilfiger on it? What are they saying?"

Or what about the famous Burberry check, now a chav status symbol?

"Exactly, and just when you think you've got something important its authenticity then vanishes. It's not only that we are almost walking billboards; it is that we aspire to the condition of living in an advertisement. We've all heard the phrase "the unexamined life is not worth living"; now the un-televised life is not worth living."

"So we try and fill the gap, and what do we try and fill it with? We try and attach to the product some sort of emotional value. And what more and more people are selling is the brand, not the product. And I think there are ways in which what the advertisers do is a lot like the spiked monkey experiment, the more spiked we get, the tighter we cling to the mother. The more we buy something and it doesn't make us fulfilled, [the more] we charge the credit card, buy more stuff: a better mobile phone, a nicer pen". "If only I had latest Macintosh, upgrade fever, new software", "oh I can't wait for Word 2007, because then somehow I will be a better writer"

Asked if we sometimes choose a disguise from the "dressing-up box" in order to protect ourselves from the opinions and judgements of those who would sum us up in a few seconds, Bywatersmuses:

"What is it disguising? It's disguising what we perceive to be the hum and drum nature of our lives. But the other weird thing is that we dress up as what we would like to be. I mean take the pilot watch for example: as I have written in the book, the pilot watch is a complete mystery to me. I mean, why do I wear a pilot watch? What I should do is wear something that isn't a pilot watch, but it's amazing how many pilots wear pilot's watches and are vaguely embarrassed about it. Because if I can fly stuff and I wear a pilo's watch, I'm actually pretending to be something I am anyway."

So was it a surprise to Bywater during the writing of the book that he too is susceptible to the same gullibility he defines as infantile?

"Well, exactly, but as a reader of Big Babies it is quicker to dismiss the feeling than before. So is that what Bywater wants his book to achieve? To make people more aware? To look out for the con, the trick and the illusion? For people to say "we are not going to be treated like this". To say "no, you cannot have my thumbprint", "no I will not carry an identity card", "no there is not going to be a DNA database", "no we do not find ourselves impressed by the sight of the Prime Minister playing f****** air guitar". "Yes it is time everyone grew up", "no we are not children, and we are not clients of some state"

Despite the book's simplistic thesis and its wide publicity, I feel it has at least triggered a debate. In many respects the infantilising trends that Bywater so wittily identifies are a product of consumerism, requiring complex structures of social control. The more we depend on material status symbols and morale-boosting injections of mass-marketed entertainment, the more we tend to delegate control of our lives to other authorities, whether corporate or governmental. One may disagree with much of Mr Bywater's bias, write him off as a reactionary old twat, but that misses the point. Whenever you read something, always ask why it was written and in what circumstances. Buzzwords such as self-empowerment are meaningless unless we begin to actually think for ourselves and not look behind our shoulders in case of member of the thought Gestapo is at large, ready to apply some unspeakable epithet if you sing from the wrong hymn sheet.

The book offers no magic solutions, no manifesto for change, it urges us merely to reject the rhetorical charm of the purveyors of spin and see through a multitude of agendas being sold to us on false pretences. My solution is simply to treat the enforcers of establishment-imposed political correctness, a byword for the party line, like overgrown playground bullies. But for serious research into the undeniable postponement of emotional maturity, I'd look elsewhere. Oliver James' new popularised book Affluenza is good start, but also read Stephen Law's The War For Children's Minds, that's where the real battle is. Get'em young and they'll be your obedient servants for life!

Categories
Computing

Dear Macophobe Charlie Brooker

In response to Charlie Brooker's piece on Guardian Comments Free: Why I hate Macs

Hey, I'm using a Mac and also use Linux on another machine, use Windows XP + Linux at work and have endured my fair share of woes with the various incarnations of fenestrated operating systems falling victim to viruses, spyware and persistent crashes. I also plugged in a three-button wheel mouse as I'd become accustomed to frequent right clicks in my Windows days. However, with a Mac mouse, you just control-click to bring up a context menu. Besides Macs have so many command, option and control + other key combinations that right-clicking is really something for the clueless, "Err what do I do here?"

Next, the relative absence of first-person shooters would seem to be one of the most endearing advantages of this platform, but if you are seriously so demented (and I mince not my words) you could simply install VM-Ware or Parallels, but as I said such moronic games are for losers I would certainly not trust to approach my children.

If you are a real man and want to understand the inner workings of a computer, install Gentoo Linux, learn VI and do all your file management at the command line just like I can do this on this MacBook. Under the hood, beneath the superficial eye candy of the Aqua frontend, it's rocks-solid Free BSD. In my experience most Windows users cannot even install a lousy graphics driver (and I should know as I used to work on tech support for moronic video games), something many will have to do when they upgrade to Vista. I bet you're one of those hostages to MicroDoom who think you need a bloated proprietary Office suite to reproduce a few bullet points and spell-check your 300 word articles. Thanks to the grip that Microsoft holds on the collective psyche, millions of working class school kids are unaware that OpenOffice (or NeoOffice on the Mac) is a free and 100% legal download or the age of the £50 Linux laptop is upon us. Quite frankly IT in most UK secondary schools should be renamed Microsoft Point and Click Product Training. That's why Apple can make frankly pathetic claims that Macs run Office too. So what? The future lies clearly with XML, open standards, peer-to-peer networks and virtualisation technology, not with monolithic and monopolistic software suites.

While I have no illusions in the philanthropy of Steve Jobs and dislike any association with trendy I-podding consumers, I hope you enjoy the benefits of your deference to an even bigger predator. The fact is if you want a reliable machine for Web surfing, writing, number-crunching, editing photos and videos and programming that also has a battery of life of up to 6 hours (usually around 4 hours), can fit into your knapsack, can vpn into Windows or Linux networks, runs NeoOffice with full interoperability with ODF (Google it) as well as Microsoft Office formats and PDF and the Gimp (Google it) free of charge as well as 100s of open-source Unix apps, then a MacBook running Mac OS X ain't a bad choice. Otherwise get yourself a second-hand PC on ebay from some nerd upgrading to Vista and install Ubuntu.