The Edge of Sanity -- Call Centres in the Future

A (very!) short play, written for radio, by Sarah Horne. Featuring: call-centres, Alanis Morrisette, David Hasselhoff, red telephone boxes, and general strangeness. Is this the modern-day, Amazon?

On the Election Results and the Brexit Party

(Why did people vote for the Brexit Party?)

It’s pretty depressing to see the Brexit Party topping the election results. The Party with no policies, headed by a bloke who, according to a close school friend, allegedly used to like that his initials also stood for National Front; that he sang ‘gas em all’ at school — that an old College teacher had been informed by other teachers, that Farage had held “publicly racist and fascist views,” and that he had once “marched through a Susses village singing Hitler Youth songs.” (1). (Trevor Phillips (founding chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission) in an article for the Times earlier this year, defended Farage, saying ‘Farage is dangerous, but he’s not a racist.(2))

I think there is a silver lining to this dark cloud. As the results were announced last night, the political news editor, Laura Kuenssberg, said, that the votes strongly suggested what’s simply wanted is clarity over Brexit; staying in, or leaving. I agree. (I think Labour are missing a trick by keeping their stance set to leave.) I think Corybn is great but his stance over this reflects his stubborn nature too — inflexibility is not what’s needed here, but a willingness to step back and say ‘this isn’t bloody going to work, it is?!” We desperately need honesty, right now. (Theresa May’s inability to be able to show us her humanity also perhaps helped drive people towards the jovial Farage. Perhaps too, that will steer us towards Boris Johnson to succeed her. People are mistaking their personas for decency.)

I can understand that some people have perhaps been driven out of their minds by Brexit, but knee-jerk reactions are rarely good, and the Brexit Party have revealed no policies whatsoever. Who in their right mind would vote for a party with no policies, just to make a point? Or, can it really be that frighteningly easy? Is it all about the power of persuasive rhetoric, spin doctors, the cult of personality?

Information that’s easier to process is viewed more positively. Cognitive scientists refer to this as ‘processing fluency,(3)’ and it’s why people’s knowledge base can be filled with flawed ideas, without their believing this to be the case. This could help to explain why people voted for Farage — an easy way out that seems simple — especially as a knee-jerk reaction to Theresa May trying to present the same deal three times to the European Parliament, only for it to be rejected each time. People want to believe Britain can be Great Again, in the same way MAGA (Make America Great Again), worked —a hark back to times before, also appeals to nostalgia which seems to be more powerful as people get older. (In these instances, it could be said, both of these campaigns might refer to nostomania — a nostalgia for times which simply did not exist.)

Our system of politics has become muddied with additional popular parties recently, such as the Brexit Party, or Change UK. Change UK have no concrete idea how they would implement real change. (And what change? To whose benefit? They are being bankrolled by big businesses, which does not sound like fertile ground for freedom in innovation.) And Farage might seem more benign now he’s no longer associated with UKIP, with Carl Benjamin talking about such murky things as ‘rape jokes’, for instance. But as with UKIP, I’m sure the darker side of human nature absolutely will be lurking within Brexit, both in leaders and followers, too. Not all Brexiteers are racist or bigoted — but racists etc. absolutely will be drawn to this party like catnip. Brexit Party, former Tory MP and now MEP, Anne Widdecombe has won one of three seats for the South West; she’s a right-wing Catholic, ‘pro-lifer’ (there’s a term that I never get tired of hearing). “While serving as Prisons Minister under Prime Minister John Major, in 1996, Ms Widdecombe defended the practice of shackling pregnant women during labour.” [...]“She has also pressed support for so-called ‘gay cure’ therapy, according to PinkNews. (4). (I saw a recent documentary about a man who ran a ‘gay cure’ centre — he later came to realise the psychological harm it had done.)

What does she say of Brexit? That a “no deal Brexit should still be considered while also admitting that there may be “bumps along the road.” She insisted it was nothing compared to the price generations had to pay for freedom in World War 2.” (5). Well that’s OK then?! In truth, our freedoms would be artificial, trade deals would not fall magically into our laps, laid by a golden goose, and standards would have to be compromised. We are more protected under EU regulation; without this, I’d be worried for our collective future.

People need to stop and think, come election time. We don’t have amazing choices right now, parties are divided and there’s so much anger over Brexit. But — it still boils down to fairly straightforward choices. Who is the party who will demonstrate compassion towards those with the least? Who will look after the interests of the poor, or people with disabilities. (Not to strip everything from the rich, or raise taxes to the point that more business leave the country, but simply to recognise problems and be willing to help those in need.)

And who will take care of the environment? What about animals? The Tories seem to stand only for the elite these days. They are so out of touch, that most of them didn’t even bother to turn up to debate the UN’s damning report about 14m British people living in poverty. Only 14 MPs bothered to be present. Amber Rudd, the Work and Pensions Secretary, who has defended the Universal Credit system, simply did not turn up. The Tories do not seem keen on listening to the truth about poverty in this country. These are the deeper issues that we need to bear in mind when we hit the ballot boxes. Do we want a party who secures our NHS or destroys it? Who privatises companies at the detriment of our country? Who will try to represent your interests? Would Farage really be the man for the job?

Our choices are far from perfect. Most political parties are not perfect. Lord knows, the system needs tweaking. Voting is important, but it’s a responsibility. Voting for Farage as a defiant response, doesn’t even begin to address other, more important, issues. There are so many bigger concerns than the egos of people who feel thwarted and indignant over Brexit.

The Brexit Party have said in response to their victory: “it took the Labour Party 45 years to win the popular vote. The Brexit Party have done it within 45 days. This is a victory for the people.” No it isn’t. It’s a travesty. But it does show a flaw in how we can think. We want Brexit to be easier, so we backslide towards a party which paints it as not only being easier, but somehow a little bit heroic. If we are not willing to work on our own selves, and examine our reasons honestly and unflinchingly, is it any wonder history repeats itself?

(1): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-fascist-nazi-song-gas-them-all-ukip-brexit-schoolfriend-dulwich-college-a7185236.html
(2): https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/farage-is-dangerous-but-he-s-not-a-racist-pj3cmsbfk
(3): https://www.fastcompany.com/3063319/how-your-brain-keeps-you-believing-crap-that-isnt-true
(4): https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/ann-widdecombes-political-views-surprise-many-celebrity-big-brother-viewers/
(5): https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1125162/Brexit-News-Ann-Widdecombe-news-update-latest-party

Godzilla Versus Meditation

(or 'How to Live a Spiritual Life when there’s good shit on at the cinema')

Sometimes the choices you want to make boil down to the ridiculous. A while ago now, I found myself wrestling with a choice of either going to see Godzilla at the cinema, or going to my meditation class. On that occasion, Godzilla won! Proving that sometimes options can be fun – and that the monkey mind will always find reasons *not* to meditate! Always! And, sometimes you can find that you’re standing at a crossroads and although the path to take seems obvious, there is still so much comfort from reliving old stories of who we are, whether these stories serve us or not. No matter how beautiful the meditation has been (which usually leads to my trying to cling on to that beauty). Sometimes, Godzilla wins. And maybe that’s OK – because meditation cannot be clung to. It’s the moments where you sit without expectation, where you can truly let go, where you will find what you need.

I can see the challenge in your eyes – and the tiredness. 'How do you live a spiritual existence,' you begin and gesture round, helplessly, 'when we live in this madness, this world of chaos, where death can strike without notice and sorrow is often intermingled with happiness; where the media and money are our new Gods and nightclubs are neon, plastic, places of worship. Where mankind keeps repeating the same old patterns of warfare and drama. Where some people are so caught up in pain that they can see no end. Where ego is king, and Trump is leader of the USA. Where on Earth do we begin?'

We simply begin where we are. There is no magic that need to be conjured. We don’t need to wait for life to be perfect. We can’t wait for our leaders to be ethical and the madness to stop. We just begin where we find ourselves. Leaders will continue to be idiots. We will be driven to the brink of madness and back again. The madness can never stop, when ego is king. Unless we have total nuclear disarmament, perceived threats to the ego will only cause the weapons to get bigger, with more ridiculous swagger – we’ve written defcon 1 into our collective DNA, time and time again (but love is on our side, and life is more than this physical body.  And love has already won).

 We can only watch as the Farage and Theresa May and Donald Trump all jostle for attention; as idiotic machinations become more ingrained; as the forest of thorns becomes ever more impenetrable. As religious people act without God present. (We can march, and sign petitions, but we can only do what we can do. After that, there are only the choices that you have, and the thoughts that inspire those choices and the art of life, because who you are is a series of choices, and who you want to be is built from your thoughts, and when external life is hard, you have your inner resources -- always -- to softly guide you home.)

 If you stand still and listen, you might hear your ancestors calling you.  Perhaps they're telling you to stand tall and dream your best version of yourself into being, because even though, like all of us, you’re imperfect and cracked, you're still beautiful. Every action starts with a single thought; all you can be is all that you are in any given moment. So long as you do your best, that’s more than enough. And when you're weary, and feel small and cold and alone in the splendour of the universe and the insanity of this world -- please know that you're never alone, they are always with you.  Sometimes the answers are not what you'd expect.  Sometimes the answers lie beyond conscious thought and are hinted at in dreams.  Sometimes the answers are something left-field and require only a willingness to participate, no matter how illogical.  The faith is the heartbeat within you, the ancestral call is your call, because you've been here before, my friend.  Perhaps many times.  You know these shores, you've felt this pain before.  You've born witness to the miraculous, the just and unjust; unfurling flowers and the truth from a pure mountain stream.

And sometimes.  Just sometimes, the answer is Godzilla.

On Love

I don't know how to write about love. 

That is, not in the cheesy, schmaltzy way that is so easy to slip into.  I've been in love, all the wrong kinds with the wrong people, for some years of my life, and now it is that I find myself in love, and loving, the right person.  The person.  My lobster.  Oh lobster, where have you been all these years?!!  For when you find the right one, and by that I do mean just that; the person you've waited for all your life without knowing you were waiting, the person so delightfully wonderful you want to go everywhere with them, all of the time in pure rapture and contentment -- when you find them, well, that's soul-enrichment right down to your bones.

To write love is to invite ridicule, because you cannot write it.  It's like God.  That clever old 13c Sufi mystic and poet, Rumi knew that you cannot write about God directly, coz, well, God, right?  You cannot ever find words to adequately describe that Great Mystery - only allude to it, with lines of poetry that sound nice and pleasant to the average ear but when illuminated by God then - by God, you can see the textures and layers and that they suddenly make sense.  Kinda like one of those 3d picture puzzle things where you have to squint your eyes to see a whole other picture behind the one shown.  (And I'm not saying my partner is like a God, only that the love and joy and contentment I feel are beyond words.)

If I were a better poet I could write it.  I could allude to the joy I feel every time I see his face.  I could write of the gratitude of being able to walk with this man for even a short time on this Earth.  To be with him, to know him, is a gift.  It's a reminder that we all fall in love all over the place, some carefully, some not so, but the process of loving another in joy and gratitude and surrender is a part of the mix too.  The falling isn't the end.  It's the beginning.  It's the reminder that we have been given a huge, priceless gift of a person who wants to walk with us for a time.  It's a call to love that person as deeply and mindfully as you can, in friendship and in love.  And we don't always get it right, sometimes we snap over small things and forget that the journey and the person is bigger than that.  And then we remember the journey, the love, and we continue.  

I don't know how long I have this gift of love for.  I can only do my best to honour this beautiful man as much as I can, my failings permitting.  In the meantime, if you have stumbled across this post, I wish you love.

Trump and the Theatre of the Absurd - parallels with McCarthyism

People are rightly worried with Trump's rhetoric echoing Hitler's Nazi Germany, 'othering' or alienating, others.  But it was pointed out to me recently also how spookily similar Trump's presidency is, to McCarthyism and the communism scare in 1950's America, from a friend who is currently reading  The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid, by the rather splendid, Bill Bryson.  My friend pointed me to the following excerpt (from Chapter 7, page 186 onwards).
Bryson wrote this book in 2006, but he could easily have been talking about Trump in places: 

 *******

"Only one thing came close to matching the fearfulness of teenagers in the 1950s and that was of course Communism. Worrying about Communism was an exhaustingly demanding business in the 1950s. Red danger lurked everywhere – in books and magazines, in government departments, in the teachings of schools, at every place of work. The film industry was especially suspect. ‘Large numbers of moving pictures that come out of Hollywood carry the Communist line,’ Congressman J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, gravely intoned to approving nods in 1947, though on reflection no one could actually think of any Hollywood movie that seemed even slightly sympathetic to Marxist thought. Parnell never did specify which movies he had in mind, but then he didn’t have much chance to for soon afterwards he was convicted of embezzling large sums from the government in the form of salaries for imaginary employees. He was sentenced to eighteen months in a prison in Connecticut where he had the unexpected pleasure of serving alongside two of the people, Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Junior, whom his committee had put away for refusing to testify.

Not to be outdone, Walt Disney claimed in testimony to HUAC that the cartoonists’ guild in Hollywood – run by committed reds and their fellow travellers, he reported – tried to take over his studio during a strike in 1941 with the intention of making Mickey Mouse a Communist. He never produced any evidence either, though he did identify one of his former employees as a Communist because he didn’t go to church and had once studied art in Moscow. 

It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron. Billy James Hargis, a chubby, kick-ass evangelist from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, warned the nation in weekly sweat-spattered sermons that Communists had insinuated themselves into, and effectively taken over, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Education, the National Council of Churches and nearly every other organization of national standing one could name. His pronouncements were carried on five hundred radio stations and two hundred and fifty television stations and attracted a huge following, as did his many books, which had titles like Communism: The Total Lie and Is the Schoolhouse the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? 

Although he had no qualifications (he had flunked out of Ozark Bible College – a rare distinction, one would suppose), Hargis founded several educational establishments, including the Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Youth University. (I would love to have heard the school song.) When asked what was taught at his schools, he replied, ‘anti-Communism, anti-Socialism, anti-welfare state, anti-Russia, anti-China, a literal interpretation of the Bible and states’ rights’. Hargis eventually came undone when it was revealed that he had had sex with several of his students, male and female alike, during moments of lordly fervour. One couple, according to The Economist, made the discovery when they blushingly confessed the misdeed to each other on their wedding night. At the peak of the Red Scare, thirty-two of the forty-eight states had loyalty oaths of one kind or another. In New York, Oakley notes, it was necessary to swear a loyalty oath to gain a fishing permit. In Indiana loyalty oaths were administered to professional wrestlers. The Communist Control Act of 1954 made it a federal offence to communicate any Communist thoughts by any means, including by semaphore. In Connecticut it became illegal to criticize the government, or to speak ill of the army or the American flag. In Texas you could be sent to prison for twenty years for being a Communist. In Birmingham, Alabama, it was illegal merely to be seen conversing with a Communist. 

HUAC issued millions of leaflets entitled ‘One Hundred Things You Should Know About Communism’, detailing what to look out for in the behaviour of neighbours, friends and family. Billy Graham, the esteemed evangelist, declared that over one thousand decent-sounding American organizations were in fact fronts for Communist enterprises. Rudolf Flesch, author of the bestselling Why Johnny Can’t Read, insisted that a failure to teach phonics in schools was undermining democracy and paving the way for Communism. Westbrook Pegler, a syndicated columnist, suggested that anyone found to have been a Communist at any time in his life should simply be put to death. Such was the sensitivity, according to David Halberstam, that when General Motors hired a Russian automotive designer named Zora Arkus-Duntov, it described him in press releases, wholly fictitiously, as being ‘of Belgian extraction’. No one exploited the fear to better effect than Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican senator from Wisconsin. In 1950, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed to have in his pocket a list of two hundred and five Communists working in the State Department. The next day he claimed to have another list with fifty-seven names on it. Over the next four years McCarthy waved many lists, each claiming to show a different number of Communist operatives. In the course of his spirited ramblings he helped to ruin many lives without ever producing a single promised list. Not producing evidence was becoming something of a trend.  

Others brought additional prejudices into play. John Rankin, a senior congressman from Mississippi, sagely observed: ‘Remember, Communism is Yiddish. I understand that every member of the Politburo around Stalin is either Yiddish or married to one, and that includes Stalin himself.’ Against such men, McCarthy looked almost moderate and fairly sane. 

Such was the hysteria that it wasn’t actually necessary to have done anything wrong to get in trouble. In 1950, three former FBI agents published a book called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, accusing 151 celebrities – among them Leonard Bernstein, Lee J. Cobb, Burgess Meredith, Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson and the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee – of various seditious acts. Among the shocking misdeeds of which the performers stood accused were speaking out against religious intolerance, opposing fascism and supporting world peace and the United Nations. None had any connection with the Communist Party or had ever shown any Communist sympathies. Even so, many of them couldn’t find work for years afterwards unless (like Edward G. Robinson) they agreed to appear before HUAC as a friendly witness and name names. 

Doing anything at all to help Communists became essentially illegal. In 1951, Dr Ernest Chain, a naturalized Briton who had won a Nobel Prize six years earlier for helping to develop penicillin, was barred from entering the United States because he had recently travelled to Czechoslovakia, under the auspices of the World Health Organization, to help start a penicillin plant there. Humanitarian aid was only permissible, it seems, so long as those being saved believed in free markets. Americans likewise found themselves barred from travel. Linus Pauling, who would eventually win two Nobel prizes, was stopped at Idlewild Airport in New York while boarding a plane to Britain, where he was to be honoured by the Royal Society, and had his passport confiscated on the grounds that he had once or twice publicly expressed a liberal thought. 

It was even harder for those who were not American by birth. After learning that a Finnish-born citizen named William Heikkilin had in his youth briefly belonged to the Communist Party, Immigration Service employees tracked him down to San Francisco, arrested him on his way home from work, and bundled him on to an aeroplane bound for Europe, with nothing but about a dollar in change and the clothes he was wearing. Not until his plane touched down the following day did officials inform his frantic wife that her husband had been deported. They refused to tell her where he had been sent. 

In perhaps the most surreal moment of all, Arthur Miller, the playwright, while facing congressional rebuke and the possibility of prison for refusing to betray friends and theatrical associates, was told that the charges against him would be dropped if he would allow the chairman of HUAC, Francis E. Walter, to be photographed with Miller’s famous and dishy wife, Marilyn Monroe. Miller declined. 

In 1954, McCarthy finally undid himself. He accused General George Marshall, the man behind the Marshall Plan and a person of unquestioned rectitude, of treason, a charge quickly shown to be preposterous. Then he took on the whole of the United States Army, threatening to expose scores of subversive senior staff that he claimed the Army knowingly shielded within its ranks. In a series of televised hearings lasting thirty-six days in the spring of 1954 and known as the Army–McCarthy hearings, he showed himself to be a bullying, blustering buffoon of the first rank without a shred of evidence against anyone – though in fact he had always shown that. It just took this long for most of the nation to realize it. 

Later that year McCarthy was severely censured by the Senate – a signal humiliation. He died three years later in disgrace. But the fact is that had he been just a tiny bit smarter or more likeable, he might well have become President. In any case, McCarthy’s downfall didn’t slow the assault on Communism. As late as 1959, the New York office of the FBI still had four hundred agents working full time on rooting out Communists in American life, according to Kenneth O’Reilly in Hoover and the Un-Americans. 

Thanks to our overweening preoccupation with Communism at home and abroad America became the first nation in modern history to build a war economy in peacetime. Defence spending in the Fifties ranged between $40 billion and $53 billion a year – or more than total government spending on everything at the dawn of the decade. Altogether the US would lay out $350 billion on defence during the eight years of the Eisenhower Presidency. More than this, 90 per cent of our foreign aid was for military expenditures. We didn’t just want to arm ourselves; we wanted to make sure that everybody else was armed, too. 

Often, all that was necessary to earn America’s enmity, and land yourself in a lot of trouble, was to get in the way of our economic interests. In 1950, Guatemala elected a reformist government – ‘the most democratic Guatemala ever had’, according to the historian Howard Zinn – under Jacobo Arbenz, an educated landowner of good intentions. Arbenz’s election was a blow for the American company United Fruit, which had run Guatemala as a private fiefdom since the nineteenth century. The company owned nearly everything of importance in the country – the ports, the railways, the communications networks, banks, stores and some 550,000 acres of farmland – paid little taxes and could count confidently on the support of a string of repressive dictators. 

Some 85 per cent of United Fruit’s land was left more or less permanently idle. This kept fruit prices high, but Guatemalans poor. Arbenz, who was the son of Swiss immigrants and something of an idealist, thought this was unfair and decided to remake the country along more democratic lines. He established free elections, ended racial discrimination, encouraged a free press, introduced a forty-hour week, legalized unions and ended government corruption. Needless to say, most people loved him. In an attempt to reduce poverty, he devised a plan to nationalize, at a fair price, much of the idle farmland – including 1,700 acres of his own – and redistribute it in the form of smallholdings to a hundred thousand landless peasants. To that end Arbenz’s government expropriated 400,000 acres of land from United Fruit, and offered as compensation the sum that the company had claimed the land was worth for tax purposes – $1,185,000.

United Fruit now decided the land was worth $16 million actually – a sum the Guatemalan government couldn’t afford to pay. When Arbenz turned down United Fruit’s demand for the higher level of compensation, the company complained to the United States government, which responded by underwriting a coup. 

Arbenz fled his homeland in 1954 and a new, more compliant leader named Carlos Castillo was installed. To help him on his way, the CIA gave him a list of seventy thousand ‘questionable individuals’ – teachers, doctors, government employees, union organizers, priests – who had supported the reforms in the belief that democracy in Guatemala was a good thing. Thousands of them were never seen again. 

And on that sobering note, let us return to Kid World, where the denizens may be small and often immensely stupid, but are at least comparatively civilized. fn1 Nuclear testing came to a noisy peak in October 1961 when the Soviets exploded a fifty-megaton device in the Arctic north of the country. (Fifty megatons is equivalent to fifty million tons of TNT – more than three thousand times the force of the Hiroshima blast of 1945, which ultimately killed two hundred thousand people.) The number of nuclear weapons at the peak of the Cold War was sixty-five thousand. Today there are about twenty-seven thousand, all vastly more powerful than those dropped on Japan in 1945, divided between possibly as many as nine countries. More than fifty years after the first atomic tests there, Bikini remains uninhabitable."