Good Cop/Bad Cop

There is a system of interrogation known to police forces the world over. It is called “Mr Hard and Mr Soft”. It works like this. Mr Hard comes into your cell. He is loud, threatening and abusive. Maybe he slaps you around a bit, punches or kicks you. Finally, he leaves with a threat to ‘throw the book’ at you. Then in comes Mr Soft. He calms you, offers you a cigarette, sends out for a cup of tea or coffee. He listens to your complaint and sympathises, but stresses his own powerlessness to do anything about it. Eventually he suggests a conspiracy. If you tell him everything you know, perhaps he can prevent Mr Hard coming back.

In bourgeois democracies the political roles of Mr Hard and Mr Soft are played by the parties of the right and the parties of the left. The worse the right behaves, the more attractive the left appears. This illusion is as dangerous in politics as it is in the police cell.

- Bigger Cages, Longer Chains

 

The primary political brilliance of a coalition government such as ours is that it encapsulates the ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine into a single administration, allowing an ever tighter influence on the terms of political debate.

For a while after the coalition formed there was a honeymoon period where neither party could afford the impression of instability and disagreement. A few formalised differences of policy (such as the AV referendum) later, and Nick Clegg’s open objections to the Prime Minister’s European veto have liberated both parties from a default pretence at unanimity. Clegg and Cameron can now fully exploit the potential of their ‘good cop/bad cop’ relationship to engineer mainstream political discourse.

By openly disagreeing with the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats are able to occupy, define and moderate opposition to Conservative policies.

Some recent examples: You might agree with Cameron in his use of veto. Conversely, you might agree with Nick Clegg that it was unwise. Either way, you still support one of the Coalition leaders. Perhaps you think Cameron’s tax breaks for married couples are regressive? You will find Nick Clegg already there, saying basically what you think, though not quite in the terms and certainly not with the conviction that you would have liked to.

This is, as Bigger Cages, Longer Chains points out, the political function of all mainstream opposition in liberal democracies. The politicians, though they disagree, share the same basic values; primarily the assumption that all politics and political discourse must flow through them, as professional representatives of the public.

Sometimes the Liberal Democrats are not necessary even for this public relations function. Sometimes Cameron gets to be good cop, tempering the more right wing desires in his party. Sometimes another Conservative will appear as good cop, like Boris Johnson criticising his Prime Minister’s ‘Kosovo style’ cleansing in London or cuts to DLA (public spats which are coordinated in advance). Once or twice, the Green Party or UKIP has attempted to play good cop, restoring our faith in the system and providing recourse from the too harsh or too moderate Tories. Sometimes, even Ed Miliband is able to shout loud enough that he is the one who defines for us the terms on which we oppose the government.

An example from last year (about which the Tories and Lib Dems agreed): Labour claim to disagree with the Coalition’s policy of raising the cap on tuition fees to £9000pa, saying that the upper limit should only be £6000pa. The terms of this debate are therefore set, and a false consensus is created that university education must cost each student thousands of pounds a year. To look at the higher education funding debate as the three main parties conduct it, one would not even consider the idea that education could be free (which is why protests and direct action which defy this consensus are an important part of shifting the terms of mainstream debate).

When the Liberal Democrats make promises about Parliamentary reform or tackling tax avoidance to placate the left, make no mistake; this is their function. Not only does this government seek to speak for you against its own policies, but (if unchallenged) it will be able to dictate the terms of the debate. Public disagreements between left and right wing Parliamentarians are nothing but a ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine; they are the spectacular illusion of genuine political debate, and “this illusion is as dangerous in politics as it is in the police cell.”

Doctor Who, Sexism and Criticising Popular Things

I have become everything I feared; I’m writing a blog about Doctor Who.

This relates to the 2011 Christmas day episode and the debates about sexism that it sparked, but so many common arguments came up that it provides a pretty good template for discussing prejudice in entertainment in general. Bear with me while I tackle the specifics of the episode:

In (very) brief: Some alien trees want to migrate to a new planet but they need a living vessel capable of transporting them. The Doctor, and some children, are too ‘weak’ for this purpose, but the children’s mother is ‘strong’ and able. What people have primarily taken issue with is the essentialist view of gender in the episode and the way in which the woman becomes powerful by conforming to her prescribed role, as per the patriarchy, of mother. Much of this is expressed by the Doctor when he works out why (according to the migratory trees) ‘She is strong’ while he is weak:

’Weak and ‘strong’; it’s a translation! Translated from the base code of nature itself. You and I, Cyril, we’re weak but she’s female! More than female, she’s Mum! How else does life ever travel than mothership?!

This pun lies at the heart of the conceit of the episode, but the Doctor’s epiphany is a little flawed. Life travels in all sorts of ways that are totally irrelevant to motherhood. Cells divide, plants are pollinated (in a program in which two characters are sentient trees, this isn’t a facetious comment!) –  of course, Doctor Who is not written for bacteria or trees, or for seahorses (the males give birth) or for any of the alien species in Doctor Whowhich transfer life without a concept of motherhood, so we can forgive its anthropocentrism.

Even among humans likely to be watching the program, though, these statements (which are presented not as opinions but as a factual explanation for the action) are grossly reductive and genuinely insulting. Firstly, let’s accept that men can get pregnant and give birth. Gender is not a simple binary of male and female, and people identify (if at all) in a multitude of ways based on many criteria. To define gender exclusively by reproductive capacity is to reduce people to a biological function, rather than a personal identity.

Now, the attitude to women. The Doctor declares that to be a mother is to be ‘more than female’. Whilst it may be true that (good) parenthood requires many skills and strengths of character, to suggest that women who are not parents are somehow lesser beings is patently ridiculous. The idea that women are somehow incomplete without children, as well as being degrading and damaging on its own, is part of a broader patriarchal idea of social roles; parenthood is the job of women. My knowledge of Doctor Who is fairly sparse, but I’m pretty sure he’s a father; why couldn’t he be the vessel for the trees? Why is the female ‘stronger’ (translate, ‘better equipped’) for this? Why not ask ‘Where else do we feel at home than fatherland?’ It’s because there is an idea in our society that women are somehow inherently nurturing, caring and protective (in a way that men aren’t). This serves both to push women into lifestyles and employment based on these attributes (nurses, teachers etc) and stops them being taken seriously in other fields. Though we may pride ourselves on not being overtly sexist, this essentialism means that our prejudices about gender still define most social relations.

To some, this does not look like sexism. After all, a woman saves the day when the Doctor is incapable. Things are, naturally, more complex. Sexism is not always about men being good and women being bad; it is a set of prejudices about men and women which dictate certain appropriate attributes and roles for them. Women are, ultimately, to bear and rear children. Having a woman become heroic is good, but to have her be heroic by conforming to her patriarchal role of motherhood (literally, as she protects her children, and metaphorically, as she becomes a semi-willing vessel, a ‘mothership’, to carry life) is not progressive. Again, I stress that the issue is not just that characters think these things; it’s that reality in the show is constructed to make them true. This is a form of that most insidious prejudice, ‘benevolent sexism’. Sincere attempts to portray women as strong and powerful (which this episode probably was) can end up reinforcing prejudices which are ultimately damaging if they lack a critical awareness of those prejudices (which this program certainly did).

When I made these points during the program, I was met with a series of arguments which may be familiar to anyone who has criticised a well loved work. It was unfair to call the show sexist because, I was assured, there are strong female characters in other episodes, or because there were positive examples of fatherhood in other episodes, or because there were bad mothers in other episodes. This stemmed from an assumption that, if I identified sexism in one episode of Doctor Who, I must be condemning the whole program as sexist: specific criticism met with general defence. There was even talk of ‘forgiving’ the show, as if it could only be judged as a single entity, its constituent parts indivisible.

We do not need to view things in terms of condemnation or praise; we need to acknowledge something has problems and watch it maturely. This is well addressed in the blog How To Be a Fan of Problematic Things, though of course it extends far beyond geek fandom. The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play, but that doesn’t invalidate its value as a work of art. Triumph of the Will is a masterpiece of cinema, despite being Nazi propaganda. We all enjoy things which have bad politics, but that doesn’t make our politics bad, unless we fail to be critically thoughtful. The danger comes when people attempt to defend every aspect of a work because they are somehow invested in it. To say that an episode of Doctor Who had a sexist plot line is not to say that Doctor Who fans are sexist (unthinking loyalty to a television program regardless of the concerns of people offended by it, on the other hand, does reveal a bad set of priorities… )

So, then, the final concern when criticising and critiquing popular entertainment; is it appropriate or necessary?

If millions of people watch a program, many of them children, and if few of them are critical of its political values, then that would suggest that it is necessary to vocalise criticism when it occurs to us. As for appropriate, it’s easy to be accused, when considering light entertainment, of ‘over-analysing’, ‘reading too deeply’ or ‘thinking too much’. There is a misconception that just because a work was not written in terms of conscious political awareness that it cannot be read in those terms. To follow this line of denying critical views is a form of obtuse anti-intellectualism, and those who choose to excuse themselves from thoughtful discourse should have not further bearing on it. Much more serious, though, is that to dismiss articulated critique of popular entertainment is to shut down discourse on privilege and oppression for the sake of a television program, which is unforgivable.

It was suggested to me that ‘if you look hard enough you can find sexism in anything’ (which to be honest I don’t doubt, at least in terms of artwork since everything is the product of a pervasively sexist society), the implication being that people, presumably humourless, man-hating straw feminists, comb over everything they can find looking for things to be offended about. Of course, this isn’t the case; no one chooses what offends them, or what their reaction to a TV show is. When sitting down to watch Doctor Who, it wasn’t that I chose to see the sexism in it, it’s that I couldn’t chose not to, and yet still there was a suggestion that I and everyone else who viewed it as I did should try to ‘just watch it’, to ‘just enjoy it’, and even the notion that we might be souring the mood for those who would otherwise watch quite unproblematically.

Now, I am not an ideological purist, a dogmatic crusader or a moron; I understand that a constant sense of struggling against entrenched injustice is not good for one’s mental health. What if you’re tired? What if you see sexism every day? What if you fight misogyny every time you leave the house, what if the entire direction of your life is based, beyond your control, on your gender and what if when you sit down on Christmas day to watch some light entertainment with your family you don’t want to think about feminism and oppression and offence? Isn’t it ok to ‘switch off’? Isn’t it ok to seek escapism from time to time without feeling compelled to confront injustice and prejudice?

My only answer is of course it’s ok to seek escapism, to watch things for pleasure without composing a political response. But that’s why we need to force improvements of our popular entertainment, so that it’s possible to watch them without having to confront the tiresome and horrific inequalities that define our daily lives. Art can only ever be so far ahead of the society that produced it, and is likely to be a fair way behind, and as such will always be riddled with problems which, in our ignorance and privilege, we may only be dimly aware of. If we attempt to deny ourselves and each other, explicitly or implicitly, the act of critical analysis of the art that we consume, be it by claiming that the work doesn’t warrant so sophisticated a reading or by declaring that offence taken is somehow not valid, we leave ourselves disenfranchised. If we value our ability to watch a television program unchallenged as higher than someone else’s ability to watch it uninsulted then we have probably picked the wrong side in a long established relationship of privilege and degradation. We may choose to sit quietly through the objectionable bits of a work of art, from time to time, even when it offends us, but we can’t expect other people to do so with us (even on Christmas day) and we must be prepared to acknowledge it when the things we like problematically contain things we have to hate.

Black History Revisionism Month

A new memorial has been unveiled in Washington DC. Martin Luther King is honoured on the National Mall, the site of his iconic “Dream” speech and the 2-300,000 March on Washington. As I have argued before, the erection of a statue or monument is a political act which helps to simplify history, solidify orthodoxies and negate dissenting opinion. King, whose name has become synonymous with pacifism and non-violence, is to be celebrated alongside a cavalcade of militaristic memorials dedicated to generals and war-time presidents, and it illustrates the pervasive attitude that violence by the state (or by revolutionaries, history being written by the victors) is glorious, while violence by citizens is unacceptable. Whatever nuance or contradiction his views may have had, Martin Luther King’s legacy has become a talisman against any assertion of forceful strength by the ordinary citizens.

This significant unveiling in America coincides with Black History Month in the UK (October), and the Metro recently carried a double page spread of the ‘50 top black heroes’, who are apparently ‘battling it out to be named the most inspirational black man or woman’. The paper boasts that “readers can help crown this year’s winner in a contest organised by Metro and City Hall to mark Black History Month.” Not being a Metro reader, I am spared the difficulties of deciding whether last year’s winner, Leona Lewis, is more or less deserving than the man who invented Reggae Reggae sauce of this lofty accolade. There’s also a guy from Eastenders and Naomi “blood diamond” Campbell. Dianne Abbott is on this list. Dianne Abbott is a contender for the most inspiring black person of all time. Of all time.

Naturally, I don’t expect the Metro to produce a historically coherent article about anything, but it is more than incompetence that accounts for this patchy list. Perhaps the most glaring omission from this list is Malcolm X (or any of the Black Panthers or other militant black rights campaigners in 20th century America). While Martin Luther King’s photograph is prominently displayed at the top of the page, the man who historical convention has come to regard as his more radical counterpart is conspicuously absent. Again, I am not naive enough to expect the Metro or City Hall to celebrate a militant organiser, an advocate of the armed struggle, a man from whose lips emanated the immortal words “by any means necessary”, but we see the inherent problem of celebrating representatives of oppressed groups. Black people in America, and in this country, and all over the world, were oppressed both by the state and by dominant prejudice. Any black activist who was committed to improving their lot and had the courage of their convictions was necessarily opposed to the state’s authority, because the state was (and is) racist. Similarly, any honest list of female heroes will throw up a handful of Suffragettes who were prepared to break the law (and windows, and bones), transgressing against the state because the state was (and is) sexist.

This presents a problem for any modern group, be they government or free “newspaper”, which doesn’t support insurrectionary dissidence but does want to celebrate the history of an oppressed group by championing individuals. The result, in this article, in the exhibition it advertises, and (one can predict) in most of Black History Month, is the same revisionism which pervades so much of the discourse relating to the struggle of black people in our society; City Hall and the Metro inherently have far more in common with the oppressors of the past than they do with the heroes.

Martin Luther King is celebrated above other significant figures because he firmly advocated non-violence. This is a source of great inspiration to many, and his legacy is rooted in a broad respect for his stance, but we cannot discount the state’s role in influencing in the way such ideas are spread. The tactical and moral superiority of non-violent protest is a received opinion, quietly endorsed by these continual celebrations. The state has delegitimised all but the most inoffensive challenges to its authority, just as one would expect it to, negating, revising, distorting the voices of those who said that it was the violence of the state, not of the individual, that was intolerable.

When we allow the salient facts of the past to be defined and articulated by the vested interests of power, we create not history but propaganda, and we must be wary.

Where Have All The Protest Songs Gone?

“Where have all the protest songs gone?”, Eleanor Margolis laments in the New Statesman this week. Margolis recounts a trip to the End of the Road festival where she saw Robin Ince introduce Grace Petrie, “a guitar-wielding 20-something” who played a set of protest songs; defiant songs both about the agendas and ideals of modern protester movements and about protests themselves, after which an unimpressed Margolis went home and penned a piece in which she asked “where have all the protest songs gone”. Well, as the first commenter on the article pointedly and rightly mentions, the place to look for protest music is not the comedy tent of the End of the Road festival, but the fact that hard edged political music filtered even into this arena, falling into Margolis’ lap without her needing to look for it, indicates that perhaps there isn’t such a dearth of protest music after all. Before Margolis gets to her point she makes a few snide remarks about the performance, and before I get to mine I’m going to briefly address them, not only because they are specifically unfair but also because there is a broader issue.

In Margolis’ eyes, Petrie’s set was a series of “painfully earnest protest songs”. I’ve seen Grace Petrie play live; it’s a stunning, moving, inspiring and thought provoking experience. This is perhaps because she writes songs like ‘Emily Davidson Blues’ and ‘Tonne of Bricks’ which tackle the difficult politics of protest vandalism, violence and sentencing. The demonisation of politically conscious students, our problematic cultural values and the hypocrisy of the legal systemare subjects I’ve written on before, but never with the talent to set to music. These are difficult ideas, and they are important for activists. Margolis, I would tactfully suggest, might not fully relate to the student protest experience articulated in these lyrics in quite the same way I do. Grace Petrie’s music is unashamed in its idealism, determination and ideology. Margolis writes as the kind of achingly self-deprecating lefty journalist who must describe a festival as a “small, boutique-y gathering of beardy Guardian readers” in order to excuse herself from being there. While I find Petrie’s performances gripping and honest, Margolis considered it “so sickeningly worthy that I nearly choked on my falafel burger”. Perhaps because she was trying to eat it ironically.

Margolis’ assertion that “the whole performance seemed to cling for its life to another era” is where we get to the real point, though I think she has missed it. The problem that we have with the question “where have all the protest songs gone” is a problem that pervades attitudes to protest and the culture of protest both within and without the activist community, which is expecting modern activity to fall into the patterns of the past. Grace Petrie herself articulated the hypocrisy at the heart of this in a tweet to me:

@MediocreDave The 2 criticisms I hear: a) we need protest music for TODAY and b) People writing protest songs belong in another era

Even If She’s Raped

***Trigger Warning***

In the debate between those who support abortion rights and those who do not, a certain familiar cliche will often tend to rear its head. One side or the other will offer up the hypothetical situation of a woman seeking an abortion after being impregnated by rape. It seems almost an inevitability, like a particularly grim analogue of Godwin’s Law, and there are many who are opposed to abortion except in cases where the woman has been raped. It seems simple, obvious even, that people might make this exception, but it’s worth considering the motivation behind it.

I broached this on Twitter, and @Rattlecans suggested that the kind of people who debate abortion from an anti-choice perspective don’t think of it as something that will ever affect them personally; for whatever reason, they and the women they know are not the kind of people who suffer unwanted pregnancies. Rape is the only way, they believe, that this kind of crisis might actually occur within their lives, and so they frame their discussion of the right to an abortion around that issue. This is probably a bit simplistic to be taken as a universal maxim but it’s a thought worth bearing in mind when these arguments come up.

My understanding of it is different, though. I think there’s an inherent subtext to that line of moral debate, which runs something like this: ‘Imagine a woman. She is pure and innocent, virginous, even, until a corrupting sexual force is imposed on her. She has absolutely no control over the circumstances of her pregnancy. She is blameless. Unlike other women, she should be allowed an abortion to restore her and nullify the rape.’

The problem here is that it reinforces some particularly damaging and illiberal attitudes to female sexual behaviour. It suggests that women who consent to sex (and maybe even enjoy it) have forfeited their right to sympathy and support in the event of unwanted pregnancy. It suggests that any woman who becomes pregnant without having been raped has no right to complain about their pregnancy.

The second major problem with rape exceptions is that they cast women entirely as victims, denying them the autonomous agency to engage responsibly in the sexual world. The abortion is a way of cleansing the sullied body, protecting the victim from the ravages of sex, rather than a way for a woman to take responsibility for her own medical state. Ultimately, framing one’s position with hypotheticals like this only allows for women to conform to one of two narrow roles: the victim, who is entirely passive and needs to be looked after, or the whore, who brings whatever befalls her upon herself and gets what she deserves.

Since this blog largely preaches to the converted, I’m directing this appeal to pro-choice readers. I understand that if you are trying to reason with someone who says that abortion is unacceptable under any circumstances, asking their feelings on cases involving rape can be an effective way to draw them away from moral certainty and make them accept that there are complex issues at play. However, not only is it a bit crass and exploitative to use hypothetical rapes to manipulate the course of a debate, but as far as I can see it’s a dead end which reinforces too many anti-choice prejudices. Abortion to avoid delivering a rapist’s child can be justified as a necessary evil, but to do so accepts that abortion in general is evil. Furthermore, it posits a kind of moral hierarchy of women seeking abortion, with some (rape survivors) as more deserving than others. Another cliche in these discussions is the woman who ‘treats abortion like emergency contraception’. This woman, because she is reckless and irresponsible, because her reason for wanting an abortion is something as unimpressive as simply not wanting to have children, is undeserving; her choice to have an abortion is far less forgivable than the rape survivor’s. It is essential to resist this kind of prejudice and not to build arguments based on the idea that some women are more or less deserving than others. As far as I can see, the only argument which pro-choice people (especially men) need to justify supporting abortion rights is this: neither I nor anyone else has the right nor the moral authority to dictate to another person the choices they make about their body. And that’s that.

EDIT: As a perfect illustration of the paternalistic misogyny that lies at the heart of this exceptionalism, @Boudledidge has sent me a link to the comments of Senator William Napoli.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO [Journalist]: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls “convenience.” He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Debt

A good friend of mine has just been sent to prison where, for a limited time, he will join other men in paying off his debt to society. Each of these men has committed, or at least been found guilty of, a crime and has been locked away. For most, if not all, of them, this custodial sentence is not keeping them off of the streets for our safety; these are not people sufficiently dangerous to the general public that they must be incarcerated at all times. Instead, there is a more complex and symbolic philosophy at work; these men are being punished, and their punishment will make amends for their crimes. Their debt to society will be repaid.

I’ve never understood it, personally. I can see how a fine or community service may be seen to fit this accepted rhetoric, with the convicted person making some formal contribution to the broader community, but a prison sentence seems to strive for an oddly karmic sense of equilibrium. A criminal has (presumably) inflicted some suffering by their crime, and in so doing has incurred a societal debt. By being caused to suffer themselves they are able to pay it off. They have been punished. I believe that’s how the logic goes, and yet unlike direct restorative justice, which sees perpetrators and victims brought together in communication to find a way to make amends, prison is not in the interests of either the victims or the wider community to any greater degree than that ‘justice’ can be seen to be done – prison costs the tax payer money. Yet, in spite of all of this, my friend was told that he had to repay his debt to society.

What I find most egregious about this phrase, and the ideology it represents, is the hypocrisy. It is the idea that we suffer and heal and forgive collectively. This is, in itself, a beautiful notion, but it is inconsistent with the nature of our judicial system. The idea of a ‘debt to society’, of a common interest, of all our fates being interwoven and our prospects interdependent is the philosophy of solidarity and comradeship, it is the philosophy of the hard left; the ideology underpinning the concept of a ‘debt to society’ can best be summarised with the phrase “an injury to one is an injury to all” – the language of the organised labour movement. And yet the idea of a ‘debt to society’ is invoked by the establishment, it is the mantra of the right, of Law and Order loving conservatives, of the children of Thatcher, who told us there was no such thing as society, of those who promote individualism and self sufficiency, and it is a hypocrisy. If we truly believed that we each have a duty to society, and that failure to act in the interests of others is a crime, we wouldn’t waste prison space with petty offenders; the cells would be filled with the the self-serving individualists; the politicians, journalists and business tycoons who place their own advancement over that of those around them. If there is such a thing as society, and if by victimising individuals within it one deserves the condemnation of the whole and incurs a debt, then we must act like it at all times, not just when it comes to sentencing criminals. If not, then we should be honest about what the justice system stands for; not to protect the shared interests of us all, but to preserve the power of the establishment and maintain the status quo.

I believe in society, and Jonnie Marbles doesn’t owe me any debt.

Memorials

Today is a good day to talk about statues.

Charlie Gilmour has just been sent down for 16 months for violent disorder during student fees riots. He notoriously swung from a union flag hanging from the Cenotaph before later harassing some royal cars, smashing up Topshop, concealing a mannequin’s leg and angrily refusing to eat cake. As the Mail puts it, ‘although Gilmour was not sentenced for his behaviour at the Cenotaph, he was told his actions were ‘reprehensible’.’

The Judge in this case, Nicholas Price QC, was quite clear, though, that Gilmour’s actions at the “empty tomb”, despite not being the crime he was prosecuted for, had certainly been reflected in the sentence. He was explicit in highlighting that Gilmour’s reckless behaviour was made significantly worse by the cultural significance of the space he did it in.

“For a young man of your intelligence and education and background to profess to not know what the Cenotaph represents defies belief,” he said.
“You have shown disrespect to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, to those who fell defending this country.”
But Gilmour was given some credit for apologising for his actions.
“You expressed yourself in a fitting way when you said how deeply ashamed you are for what is, as you acknowledge, the terrible insult to those who gave their lives,” the judge said.

BBC

For Price, it is inconceivable that an intelligent person could fail to understand the importance of the memorial. Everyone knows what it represents, and in failing to give it the reverence it is seen to deserve, Gilmour has disrespected our war dead with an insult which penetrates right to the heart of our national values.

The soldiers died, Gilmour was told, to protect his freedom and the freedom of all in this country. It is because they gave their life that Gilmour has the right to peaceful protest, and so not only did he disrespect their memory by using the flag as a rope swing, but also by failing to live within the limits of the freedom they apparently won. And this is where I start to lose my footing with established wisdom on the subject. Firstly, because of the obvious obliviousness on the part of the Judge to the irony both of lecturing a man about the privileges of freedom while simultaneously condemning his behaviour and curtailing his liberty and of chastising him for his failure to remain peaceful in the same breath as recalling the example set by soldiers in a war. Secondly, and more unsettlingly, because when one looks at the situation afresh, nothing seems more disrespectful to the thousands of dead than, decades later, to appropriate their suffering as a tool with which to admonish a foolish man for his drunken idiocy. The reverence that Price expected, the reverence we are instructed to feel about those killed in combat is a function of the gross hypocrisy surrounding the issue. At the heart of this hypocrisy is the problem of statues, monuments and artifacts of commemoration.

Today, the Queen, our head of state, unveiled a new statue to honour the work done by the men and women of Bletchley Park during the second world war. These were the nation’s best cryptographers, logicians and mathematicians and, by creating what is sometimes regarded as the world’s first computer, they were able to crack the Enigma machine’s code, which was a decisive moment in the course of the war. Little mention today was made of the fate of Alan Turing, one of the most significant thinkers of Bletchley Park. Turing was gay, and because homosexuality was a crime he was given the choice between prison or ‘treatment’ in the form of female hormones which amounted to chemical castration, which he accepted. Eventually he was found dead from cyanide poisoning, in what is presumed to be suicide. Neither Gordon Brown’s 2009 apology on behalf of the British government nor today’s statue can undo the suffering that was inflicted on Turing by a state whose ill-conceived values he was unable to live by. What we instead witness is an effort to disguise the sordid ideology on which we have built so much of our society behind a whitewash of reverence, ‘respect’ and patriotism. By honouring the work of the Bletchley Park team, the establishment is merely exploiting their legacy to celebrate itself. Turing is best known today for lending his name to the Turing Test, a means of identifying artificial intelligence. Turing enables us to differentiate between genuine humanity and its mere cynical imitation.

The Cenotaph, as our primary war monument, is possibly the most focused example of the self-serving and dishonest logic of commemoration. The inherently false values are perhaps best expressed in three words engraved on one side: “THE GLORIOUS DEAD”. Why, we must ask ourselves, is there not a monument to our glorious living? There is a legend that when the Cenotaph was unveiled soldiers who had returned from the war impoverished, wounded and hungry remarked ‘we asked for bread and you gave us stone’. Consider those words for a moment, and you begin to understand the truly chilling nature of war memorials. When sleeping rough in Westminster is criminalised in September, a proportion of the homeless people the Police will be moving along will be ex-soldiers who we will claim to honour in November. They can’t sleep in the Cenotaph. The state’s failure to adequately provide for veterans reveals its appreciation for soldiers’ sacrifices to be little more than a pose. The glorious living are an inconvenience, the glorious dead are a tool. They are to be celebrated, because their memory is a short hand for the values which keep us in line. Today, their deaths were used to criticise a twit because he had played on the cold stone with which we celebrate their suffering, and their memory was appropriated in the courts to add generations of emotional weight to the establishment’s artificial distinction between ‘proper protest’ and that which deviates from what is acceptable by providing a genuinely confrontational challenge to the state’s authority. Is this what those men died for? I suspect it probably is.

Every major war shapes our attitudes to war itself. In the days of empire, war was glorious and masculine. In the 20th century WWI and WWII were honourable, noble, righteous, necessary. As we watched Vietnam the tide began to turn, as we started to weigh up the moral authority with which the Western powers engaged overseas, the demographic of the men who died and the atrocities that were committed against indigenous people. For many of us raised on Iraq, war is an expensive, misguided, illegitimate affair, as much an assault on the decency and character of a people by their government as on one nation by another. Is it any wonder that those who engineer war are so keen to remind us of The Great War? Is it any wonder that we still talk in outdated terms of ‘trenches’, ‘the front’ and ‘no man’s land’? Is it any wonder that the symbol of our remembrance is the poppy of 1918, not the deserts or the oil fields of 2011?

Jon Snow sparked a modicum of controversy in November for declining to wear a poppy on television in the weeks leading to the 11th, as he found the gesture lost its meaning if it became just another unthinking habit. TV studios have baskets of poppies on stand by so that everyone who is to appear on camera can be fitted with one, ensuring that a consistent and unconfrontational set of values are presented at all times. Wearing a poppy to ‘remember’ the dead has become a default for the public figures who appear within the mainstream media, a cultural trend to which one conforms. The ubiquitous prevalence of poppies is, to any student of symbols and their political potency, disquieting. They hang, pinned to the lapels of every apolitical figure, as an uncritical invocation of horrific bloodshed nestled harmlessly into everyday life, or plastered all over crosses in what could almost be taken as a deliberately cold and humourless pun on religion as the ‘opiate of the masses’. They are a totem, a prop, a signifier which tells onlookers that the wearer is compassionate and caring about soldiers’ deaths but they fail to do anything to prompt deeper thought. There are those who seek to counter this without appearing unfeeling by sporting a white poppy for peace, rejecting the militaristic jingoism and the glorification of war that is suggested by the red poppy and instead embodying the only fitting sentiment that could adorn a sincere war memorial; ‘this must never happen again’.

War memorials are dishonest. They are a way to satisfy our guilt and our concerns whilst allowing us to excuse ourselves from addressing the real tragedy. Stone is an imperfect material with which to express genuine sorrow or gratitude. War memorials are a cultural shorthand for a sentiment that we no longer bother to feel. They are a two minutes silence, when what is required is a scream. They are an exploitation of tragedy. They are a celebration of death. We should not celebrate the casualties of war. We, who have the luxury of not being soldiers, should not take a second’s pleasure, satisfaction or pride in their suffering.

This morning I was prompted to remember the provocative and flippant intellectualism of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys:

“All the mourning’s veiled the truth; it’s not ‘lest we forget’ it’s ‘lest we remember’. See, that’s what all this is about; the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two-minutes silence, because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.”

Political Reform: A Proposal

Political parties should exist for a maximum of ten years, and then be completely disbanded. The career politicians would then form new parties, from scratch, with new names, policies, compositions, power structures, etc. This would stop parties exploiting their, or their opposition’s, past to curry favour. The nature of branding in politics would be seriously altered; the words ‘Conservative’ and ‘Labour’ would lose their potency and the focus would be on how to communicate and define new ideas. In essence, politics would be liberated from the tedium of tradition, from the tribalistic loyalty, from the narrow minded grudges.

It would break up the strange bedfellows who are only in the same party by historical coincidence. Why should those socialists on the left who want to support the trade unions have to share a party with New Labour? Why should socially progressive libertarians have to share a party with the bigotry and intolerance of old Tories? Why should any Lib Dem have to share a party with Nick Clegg? If people didn’t feel it necessary to opt for the main three (ultimately, the main two) parties to avoid wasting their vote, they might be able to vote more honestly. Allowing splits and factions to flourish into distinct parties gives voters a greater degree of choice in line with their outlook. For example, rather than just choosing the right wing party, you could have a choice of several different right wing parties and select the one you most identify with or have the most confidence in. It might no longer be an inescapable function of political campaigns that all the parties fight over a thin sliver of centrist middle ground.

Some of these parties, understanding their limited scope, would set up more like taskforces to respond to specific political conditions. For example, if we were experiencing a time of considerable economic turbulence and a man like Vince Cable really did feel that the best way to improve things was for him to put aside other differences and join forces with George Osborne for the good of the nation, that could happen. They could form the Deficit Reduction Party and see what the electorate felt about that.

There are two obvious objections: Firstly, that people who want to keep voting for the same party year on year would not be able to; and secondly that as parties disband and reform there would be core groups of people who stick together. Essentially, the two answer each other. There would be small cabals of politicians who, once their party had been disbanded, would remain together to form the next one, and people who were genuinely happy with their performance would vote for that new party. What the process of constant change would achieve, though, would be to shake off from the periferies of these clans all the people (politicians and supporters) who no longer shared their view, who weren’t happy, who could then go to form their own party and have it appear on a level footing with whatever new party their former colleagues had formed.

New parties entering the arena would be placed on a level playing field. Even parties made up of familiar faces would be unknown and untested to some degree. The idea of a ‘life-long Labour voter’ or a ‘life-long Conservative voter’ is ludicrous and can only exist in a world where parties to do not progress and voters’ views are not adequately represented. If we did away with the old giants, removing the default voting option, then in order to have a clue who to vote for, people would actually have to read manifestos and engage with policies.

Traditionalism, loyalty and branding produce nothing but stagnation in politics. Constant change keeps us on our toes. Constant change brings us progress.

All Women Shortlists

All Woman Shortlisting for a party’s selection of MP candidate is an often contentious point. The justification for it is that despite women making up roughly half the population of the country, they have never come anywhere near this proportion of seats in the House of Commons. A dearth of women is a problem for many reasons, chief among them that ‘women’s issues’ are given less attention than they deserve, that there is a lack of positive female role models demonstrating a woman’s capacity to exercise power and that, symbolically and literally, our political system is revealed to be dominated by, and managed in the interests of, men (and white men, at that). As important as it is to see the hugely discrepant male to female ratio rectified, AWS seem to be an imperfect, and potentially damaging, tool.

The most obvious reason to oppose them, and one which is sufficient for many to make up their minds on its strength alone, is that refusing to allow someone to run in an election on the grounds of gender or any similar characteristic is inherently at odds with the basic values of our democratic system. In fact, Labour’s use of all women shortlists was ruled illegal in 1996 under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, and remained so until the Labour government introduced the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002 to allow themselves to continue the practice.

There is also an argument that the women elected through these lists are not respected because they haven’t had to go though the same rigours as other MPs. The Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson made her opposition to all women shortlists unambiguous with a t-shirt bearing the legend “I am not a token woman”.

To some extent, though, it is for each party to decide how they select their candidates, and as the women selected through this process still have to go on to legitimately win an election, it could be argued that this does not constitute a serious democratic shortcoming. Aside from this, AWS are fundamentally at odds with another key ideology of our democracy; the idea of representation. The suggestion is that for women to be adequately represented in the House of Commons, the proportion of female MPs must be (or at least must approach) the proportion of women in society; approximately 50%. The first response to this is to recognise that women are not the only under represented minority group*. Other groups, who are also likely to be adversely affected by ignorantly made policy, might also be justified in demanding electoral manipulation to ensure representation. Why not all black or Asian shortlists? Why not all disabled shortlists? Why all openly gay shortlists? I’m not being facetious. Why not engineer things so that there are a few more working class MPs, or better still, benefits claimants? A number of MPs end up in prison, but why not engineer things so that some ex-convicts are elected; would their experiences not be useful in informed law making? Yesterday in Parliament Labour MP Paul Flynn suggested shortlists to get more people over 80 into the Commons. There is not one (acknowledged) transgender MP. Isn’t it time something was done about that? Shouldn’t a few more of our MPs be unemployed? (Ok, now I am being facetious)

Though it would be nice to see a more diverse Parliament, all women shortlists are built on the notion that in order for women’s interests to be protected, women must be represented by women. This is problematic for a representative democracy; ultimately, if you consent to be represented by someone else in a political system you must accept that they will not share all of your characteristics, up to and including gender. (Practically, if you are lucky enough to find a candidate whose political views are compatible with yours, other concerns become secondary). Furthermore, this debate focuses on the composition of the Commons as a whole, and somewhat neglects the role an MP has in representing their own constituency. Is my sister, whose MP is female, better represented, benefiting from a greater democratic empowerment, than my mother, whose MP is male? Am I served less well by my female MP than I would have been by a male one? It is worth remembering that the women of Mid Bedforshire are represented by Nadine Dorries, who, with her views on abortion, abstinence only sex education for girls and ‘just saying no’ to sexual abuse can be viewed as one of the most pressing threats to the dignity and sexual equality of women in the current Parliament. She doesn’t even support all women shortlists, so anti-feminist is she.

All of this is to say that, within the context of our democratic system, any attempt by the major political parties to influence that type of person who is elected is fundamentally undemocratic; all women shortlists are built on a rejection of the most basic concept of representation; and that women in power are no guarantee that women’s issues are being properly championed. The very idea of all women shortlists is fundamentally at odds with the internal logic of our political system.

It’s also worth looking at this in a wider context, though. All female shortlists are intended to address the recognised problem that our political system is dominated by men and maintains masculine, patriarchal privileges. With this in mind, it is seriously doubtful that this system can be a mechanism for protecting (or even understanding) women’s best interests. Put bluntly; if you do not believe that our democratic system is institutionally prejudiced in favour of men then there is no need for all female shortlists. If you do believe that our democratic system is institutionally prejudiced in favour of men then there is no reason to trust it as an agent of female empowerment. A policy handed down from above, by men, within a patriarchal system will not empower women; it is a gesture of condescension. Women cannot be given equal democratic power, as the very act of giving is an assertion of superiority. Fundamentally, our representative parliamentary democracy is a hierarchy of power and privilege which has consistently disenfranchised women. Genuine gender equality cannot be achieved with in it.

*It is worth pointing out that at half the population, women are not in any meaningful sense a numerical minority, but are referred to as one because they suffer the same effects of marginalisation, victimisation and ‘othering’ as is common for actual minorities.

Fools and Clowns: Bruce, Hicks and Stanhope

Twentieth century Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that the festive laughter of a carnival is ‘universal in scope, it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants’. [1] He went on explicitly to differentiate between this ubiquitous laughter and the laughter of ‘pure’ satire, because ‘the satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it’. [2] The difference between satirical comedy and the egalitarian folk laughter of carnival is that the satirical performer is distinct from the laughter of the audience, controlling it from above with assumed and granted authority. But while in Bakhtin’s idea of carnial the laughter is the laughter of ‘all the people’, he also describes the role of ‘clowns and fools’, individuals who stand out as being ‘the constant, accredited representitives of the carnival spirit’. [3] Stewart Lee has observed what he described as the ‘shaman-clown tradition’, stemming from ancient comic festivals, in certain modern stand up comedians, and it is helpful when looking at contemporary performances in the light of Bakhtin’s theories to think of some comics not as performers per se but as a focus for this ‘carnival spirit’, leading the collective laughter of the audience. The humour of American comedians Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks and Doug Stanhope, through whom there has widely been observed a chain of succession, can be read as one modern incarnation of Bakhtin’s folk humour, placing them in a far older tradition than is perhaps usually thought. This influence is debatable, but it manifests itself both superficially (in terms of the content of their shows, made up of grotesque taboo breaking jokes about religious and authoritarian institutions) and in a deeper sense (the very mechanics of their performance; that which accounts for their success with audiences).

Bakhtin described how in carnivaleqsue traditions ‘verbal etiquette and discipline are relaxed and indecent words and expressions may be used’ [4] and wrote of the significance of what he called ‘marketplace’ or ‘billingsgate’ language; an often vulgar vernacular of ‘curses, oaths [and] popular blazons’. [5] Far from this being a negative, he argues that ‘an ideal and at the same time real type of communication, impossible in real life, is established’. [6] What is achieved is more than unrestrained communication, however. Sue Vice wrote that ‘carnival profanation consists of ‘a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth’, to the level of the body’. [7] By debasing and linking with the body (and specifically its digestive and reproductive processes) carnival not only undermines its subjects but also strengthens them. That which denies its own reproduction and consumption has no mechanism for sustained life, whereas that which acknowledges what is natural about itself (even if a little unsavoury) is capable of continual regeneration. Bakhtin referred to this as ‘grotesque realism’; it is distasteful but it is real. The vulgarity of the ‘billingsgate’ is, deep down, a celebration; sexually explicit language is also the language of reproduction, scatological language is the language of the living body and by using this language one is allowing for and acknowledging the healthy continuation of life. As Vice wrote, ‘Death and renewal are central to carnival … the two states are inseparable’. [8]

The title of Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, demonstrates the significance of profanity in his career (as do his many arrests for obscenity). His supporters argue, however, that his shows, though vulgar, had redeeming social importance, and he has been compared directly (both in court and in a petition of support) to Rabelais, one of the central authors from whom Bakhtin derived his theory of the carnivalesque. [9] Indeed, Bakhtin could have been describing Bruce when he published in 1965 that ‘these [billingsgate] elements still prevent public reading of Rabelais, although in other respects no author is better suited for such reading’. [10] While this unacceptable language became a public distraction from the actual substance of his routines the language should not be viewed as irrelevant to this deeper satirical content. Rather, Bruce’s questioning of (and challenges to) the formal values of performance language were no different from his questioning of (and challenges to) the government, organised religion, Hollywood, etc. Satire can promote great public discourse but it is therefore always necessary to ensure that language, the tool of this discourse, is not constrained, restricted or controlled to the point of impotence. In attacking the idea that audiences should not hear certain words Bruce was also protecting a performer’s right to offend and be critical, establishing the ‘real type of communication’ that Bakhtin described. Bruce was described as a ‘moralist’ [11] and many of his jokes revolved around an attempt to hold various institutions to a consistent set of moral standards (take, for example, the line ‘the Ten Commandments doesn’t say “Thou Shallt Not Kill Sometimes…”’). [12] One of Bruce’s routines was built around the phrase ”to’ is a preposition, ‘come’ is a verb’ and was an example of how obscenity could be constructed out of individually innocuous words, as though he were trying to find the secret of what made them offensive. In place of any rational values, however, he found only hypocrisy and created performances which undermined this hypocritical behaviour. He created imagined scenes in which he could caricaturise untenable opinion and expose its shortcomings, or as Lou Gottlieb, a witness in his first obscenity trial put it ‘… as Mr. Bruce presents his performances he creates a world in which normal dimensions … are transmuted into a grotesque panorama of contemporary society’. [13] In a ‘bit’ called Christ and Moses, for example, Bruce describes those Biblical figures returning to Earth and their impression of the modern day Church, with irreligious and foul mouthed priests failing to uphold the tenets of Christianity. Burlesques of this nature, with figures of authority being recast as comic foil, have much in common with carnival.

In 1991 Eric Bogosian wrote a new introduction to How to Talk Dirty and Influence People in which he says ‘as the pendulum slowly shifts we are back in such conservative times as those that spawned [Bruce] in the first place, and so now’s the time to read him’. [14] This was also the time, though, for a successor. Bill Hicks was performing stand up comedy in a similar vein, and has been compared to Bruce in a variety of critical and popular material ever since, including Early Day Motion 678 in the British Parliament on the anniversary of his death which described him as ‘one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worth[y] of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.’ In the context of carnival, this ‘unflinching’ quality is what allowed him to defy established social conventions as Bruce did.

As with Bruce, Hicks’s work was reminiscent of the carnival practices described by Bakhtin, but while Bruce’s language allows us to consider billingsgate, Hicks advanced the performative element of this to become a more physical, more graphic, less verbal spectacle, more reminiscent of carnival burlesques and parodies. These were often vulgar, yet were based firmly in moral satire. He frequently performed routines in which various celebrities or politicians would ‘suck Satan’s cock‘ as a symbol for their lack of ethical caliber. In one recorded show he describes television presenter Dick Clark unzipping a rubber mask to reveal himself to be a ‘cloven hooved, horned wolverine‘ who then has anal sex with game show host and singer John Davidson. Hicks creates the image of ‘a black, blood gorged tic which crawls out of the scaly penis of the wolverine and into the bowels of John Davidson’, impregnating him (at this point on the recording Hicks bids farewell to audience members who are walking out). ‘Six months, six days and six hours later his bile breaks and he shits the brood’, Hicks continues before attempting to represent this action loudly and at length. With its mock religious mythology, satirical sense of ritual and grotesque bodily images every element of this routine is in keeping with medieval carnival traditions. In a similar scene he expresses his contempt for contemporary musicians by depicting Debbie Gibson, one of the ‘new rock stars who drink diet cola and shop in your malls’ being raped by Jimi Hendrix. The audience respond enthusiastically as this figurative act debases one popular figure and reinstates another through the use of sexual metaphor.

Vice wrote that ‘Bakhtin is keen to point out that carnivalesque parody and travesty are quite different from ‘the negative and formal parody of modern times’, which only denies without renewing. This is a consistent thread in his argument: in modern versions of carnival laughter, billingsgate profanations, and so on, only the downward half of the subverting movement has survived’. [15] While there is undeniably a sense of regeneration in Bill Hicks’s performances they were a constant negotiation between denial as an opportunity for renewal and denial as a negative, almost nihilistic suppression of life. A reviewer wrote that ‘the key to Hicks’s longevity is his idealism‘, and throughout his work there is an implication that we are only a few correct collective decisions away from a better world as he recognises (as Bakhtin did) the power that common people have when acting together. He says that life is ‘just a ride, and a we can change it any time we want; it’s only a choice‘. In spite of these encouraging words at the ends of his shows about how the world could be made better (which were, with a carnivalesque sense of balance, always tempered by Hicks pretending to be assassinated) it can be said that his actual appeal was not that people were convinced by this message but that they enjoyed temporarily accepting it. For the duration of his performances he liberated his audience, emotionally and intellectually, and allowed them to feel empowered, even though after his shows people would return to their lives and society would continue to operate as normal. This is comparable to the medieval carnivals Bakhtin wrote about; while they occurred the ordinary restrictions on behaviour were relaxed and the people had the power. In daily life people were subjects but during carnival they had the power collectively to crown and decrown a carnival king, they could burlesque their religious leaders, they could break taboos and talk freely. Even though it was a temporary and licensed experience carnival was attractive, just as Hick’s shows were, because it provided a window into an alternative, and presumably preferable, world. Bruce apparently believed that by exposing the hypocrisy and pettiness of the Church and the state he could affect development within them. He fought his comic battles in court and brought court transcripts into his comedy shows as though believing that vindicating his ideas could change things. Hicks, an idealist from a subsequent generation, did not so much seek to redress the harshness of society’s problems as to create a space where people could be given cathartic relief from them, being allowed to believe that a positive rebirth was possible.

The Independent on Sunday wrote that ‘there’s a kind of Olympic torch of extreme American comedy, which passed from Lenny Bruce … to the late Bill Hicks. Doug Stanhope is its latest, and equally brilliant, bearer’. Like Hicks and Bruce before him, Stanhope’s humour is grotesque; he revels in sex and scatology, he is profane and blasphemous but despite this confrontation of social values many audiences respond enthusiastically. Yet while he talks, as his predecessors did, about the problems that society creates for people, he has taken the subversive stage persona that he inherited a step further and begun to subvert that persona itself. While Bruce was called a ‘secular moralist’ and Hicks an ‘idealist’, Stanhope sets himself apart from his audiences not by being superior to them but by presenting himself as a mess, who, though perhaps inspirational, few would aspire to emulate. He complains, constantly, but about vague and sometimes unidentifiable problems, talking about ‘the media’ and ‘society’ in petulant, naively uniformed terms. While former satirists chose specific flaws in specific targets and attempted to convince the audience of a new critical viewpoint, Stanhope rages against mercurial forces of oppression which he scarcely defines, much less offers a genuine critique on. Far more than Bruce and Hicks he is a focus point for a carnival feeling, while they were (by comparison) lecturers. On his DVD Deadbeat Hero he advises his audiences not to take him too seriously, admitting ‘I’m probably wrong about half the shit I say and … you can find me to be a hypocrit’, undermining his own views in a way that the former comics didn’t. His shows, if not about the message of his words, then, are about the feeling of playful liberation he temporarily gives his audience. Of ‘clowns and fools’ Bakhtin wrote that they were ‘representatives of the carnival spirit in every day life out of carnival season’ and that they ‘remained fools and clowns always and wherever they made their appearance’, standing on ‘the borderline between life and art’. [16]  This seems, in some way, to be Stanhope’s appeal, too. ‘What makes Stanhope essential viewing is that none of this is an act’ writes one reviewer, another declaring that ‘he lives a mad, mad life and what he remembers he reports back to us’. While this type of review obviously indicates that audiences are experiencing a vicarious thrill they are also apparently willing to regard Stanhope as a living embodiment of the carnivalesque disregard for formality.

These satirists are problematic, though, because while their humour might be considered ‘folk’ in some regards (it is empowering of the people, it is democratic, it provides subversive satisfaction and appeals to a non- ruling collective consciousness) it is not all inclusive. Stanhope named a show No Refunds, playing on the likelyhood of offending his audience and failing to meet their expectations to the point that they leave and demand their money back; which demonstrates the difference between this satire, attacking dominant systems of authority on ideological or philosophical grounds, and genuine folk laughter as Bakhtin described it, which is apolitical and does not criticise these systems so much as allow for their temporary relaxation. Even as Stanhope attacks he does not specifically exclude, however. He opens one show with the advice that ‘eventually I’m going to hit a subject that you’re going to be queer about, well … don’t, just wait for the next joke … don’t get all upset’.

In these terms it can appear that Stanhope has introduced a stronger carnival spirit into American satirical stand up comedy, but this claim must be qualified by looking at the nature of his material. Despite not assuming the satirist’s moral high ground that Bakhtin spoke of Stanhope is an exponent of comedy which ‘only denies without renewing’. He discusses coarse subjects but they do not operate in the same way as carnivalesque billingsgate. While Bruce’s attitude to sex treated it as the basis for a healthy relationship, a thing that because it is so universally natural should not be taboo, Stanhope’s general approach is less balanced. He does not talk in terms of reproduction, for example, and in fact, like Hicks before him, consistently argues that there are too many people in the world and that the human race should stop reproducing, boasting in one show ‘I have a vasectomy and an abortion on my record’. As well as joking about abortion he also comments on sex as a manipulative tool, sexually transmitted diseases and child pornography; clearly placing at the heart of this humour not the positive renewal we get in carnival but a focus on damaging, unhealthy experience. Similarly, while the consumption of the carnivalesque, even when referred to indirectly by scatological imagery, was a mechanism for sustained human life, Stanhope talks in similar terms about alcohol and narcotic drugs. Again like Hicks before him (and, to a limited degree, Bruce) he is keen to point out the unreported positive effects of drugs on the mind but also highlights their negative effect on the body. Stanhope’s entire persona is built around the idea of self indulgence to the point of self destruction. This is the contradiction of his work; while he allows his audience to experience a sense of the carnivalesque, complete with its empowerment and its unity, he himself is a pessimist (‘this is the most boring generation in the history of people’) and refuses to allow for the renewal which is so central to Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theories. Stanhope’s work is difficultly complex, though. This could be alternatively read as a simple extention of grotesque realism, acknowledging that the worst limits of human excess are, whilst horrifying, not unspeakable. He addresses the negative, the dangerous and the deadly leaving the audience to negotiate for themselves the renewal.

Though there are flaws in referring to it as such, it seems that Stanhope has progressed ‘folk humour’ past the limits of the carnival to a new stage. It is still low, communal and vulgar but unlike carnival it is illicit and unlicensed, it is not all inclusive but requires a willing and sometimes troubling complicity from his audience and it no longer burlesques established figures of authority such as the Church or the state. Instead, in recognising (rightly or wrongly) that in modern society people’s situations are ultimately dictated by their own choices, Stanhope’s folk humour makes the ‘folk’ themselves its target, attacking the apathy and hypocrisy which allow people to endure disappointing lifestyles and allowing audiences, temporarily, to laugh about them and feel relieved. Here, arguably, lies the renewal and rebirth that Bakhtin wrote about as the antithesis of the negativity and denial.

*  *  *

[1] Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World (United States: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 11.

[2] Ibid. p. 12.

[3] Ibid. p. 8.

[4] Ibid. p. 16.

[5] Ibid. p. 5.

[6] Ibid. p. 16.

[7] Sue Vice Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) p. 152.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Lenny Bruce How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (United States: Fireside, 1992) p. 118, 173.

[10] Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World (United States: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 145.

[11] Frank Kofsky Lenny Bruce: The Comedian as Social Critic and Secular Moralist, (United States: Monad Press, 1974)

[12] Lenny Bruce How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (United States: Fireside, 1992) p. 71.

[13] Ibid. p. 116.

[14] Ibid. p. vii.

[15] Sue Vice Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) p. 154.

[16] Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World (United States: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 8.