Probably the main problem with life being an utterly pointless pursuit, like eating soup with chopsticks - sprinkling a room with sage in order to catch a snake, or trying to explain away the localised escalation of the murder rates of Wiltshire villages to super-Colombian levels in Midsummer Murders - is that you need to qualify it somehow. Many people do this through their jobs. For those of us magnificently lucky enough to take day-to-day survival for granted by living in a country such as Britain, there is a general consensus that you can have a moderate chance of being happy if you can find a job you like and which is fulfilling. A fulfilling job is defined as being attained once you find the niche of work that you detest the least and then kow-tow to every sordid whim of your employer (or in the case of the self-employed, your clients) until you either reach the ripe old age of fifty when you then die painfully with stress-induced boils on your face, or reach the even riper and positively mouldy age of 65 and get handed a cheque that might get you some economy baked beans and enough gin to numb your mind long enough to aim that crossbow at your own eye while standing on the parapet of a suspension bridge.
My own record on this attainment of finding a fulfilling and non-wrist-cutting job is woefully poor. Indeed a fairly hefty barricade to gaining a fulfilling job can be done without any outside intervention. Not knowing what you want to do yourself practically condemns you to one miserable job after another, and then your only hope is trying to shoehorn some semblance of a meaningful life into the remaining hours of time that remain outside work. A little like filling cracks in a wall with polyfill, but with a demonstrably lesser chance of success. That said, there is one last tactic that can at least slightly increase the probability of attaining happiness, or if not, at least stave you off that tempting-sounding newspaper clipping advertisement:
“Mortapill Corporation is looking for Experienced Smallpox Testers.
Salary: £5.52 per hour before death, rising to £11.75 after, plus bonuses and company car.
Duties: A keen advocate of alternative technologies, enthusiastic and intelligent, you will have considerable experience of catching near-fatal illnesses, and of wheezing in a generally theatrical and playful manner. A keen team-worker, your responsibilities will include drinking vial after vial of deadly smallpox, while effusing the buoyant and youth-grabbing qualities of the firm. We aim to foster a friendly environment for our staff, and have a competitiveness life insurance scheme.”
Cathartic as it sounds, it may not be the way forward. Instead, pick one thing that you enjoy, and try and tease a job out of it, much as you would tease out a flesh-eating maggot with a flame. Of course, that is to completely forget about the fact that you need skills – as Gordon Brown said approximately 60 times in a five minute television interview last night – and probably talent. My own situation involving several failed attempts at growing into a job, or attaining the necessary skills to find an enjoyable one, together with a final dismal settlement with no conceivable way out, for now, has meant some desperate thinking. The one thing I know I can stomach (excuse the upcoming pun) with any certainty is food. Cooking is not an option due to the complexity, skill, common-sense and judgement involved, and this therefore leaves two remainders – food-tasting or becoming a restaurant critic.
The first option at first seems appealing. The type of people who need food-tasters generally have a beautiful diet, rich in all the giddy nutrients that Earth can hold, and sumptuous to the extreme. The downside is unfortunately rather similar to that of the smallpox-tester. Which leaves the ‘becoming a restaurant critic’ option. And here, just for you, is my first review.
Alabama Fried Chicken, Springburn, Glasgow.
Situated in a rather unlikely position, far from the boutiques, cafes and Italian fayre of the Merchant City, this northern vestige of the city nevertheless does have the distinction of containing this delightful-looking rural United States-themed restaurant. Indeed with many pretenders aiming to leap to the heady pedestal of gastronomic perfection in this genre, it seems the perfect time to investigate exactly which treats were on offer to the discerning gentleman and his lady friend.
My esteemed guest, Lady Henrietta of Balerno, and I, did survey the outside scene with intrepidation. It seemed a far way from the good-quality fried mystique, dusty houses, broken windmills and rustic scenes of lynchings that the name of the place evoked. We were treated to an uncommon vista of tower blocks and a positively frightful dual-carriageway which seemed to take the discerning tinge off my fine-tuned palette in a way which had been foreign to me since that over-spiced filet de mignon in the Café Montmartre back in ’66. I am afraid to say that my goodly friend almost swooned as a result, but a delicate shot of snuff to her aristocratic nostrils as we traversed the ‘Drive Thru’, as the proles are want to call it, was enough to bring her round.
We entered an atmosphere of slight disarray, but which nevertheless gave the impression of a generous and pulsating vitality to the scene. The décor was of a gloriously simple design, adorned with black and white photographs of children holding coloured pieces of chicken. This was a beautiful touch which lent itself somewhat to the post-structuralist discourse of Freud while infusing his stringent prose with the playful abandonism of Andy Warhol slap-dashing colour prints on a tiled wall while sucking the gravelled voice of Lou Reed through his tobacco-forested pipe. One could imagine the musty southern air, the rising scent of the majestic Mississippi river as immortalised so vividly through childish eyes by Mark Twain, and the authentic sound of tills beeping and adolescents shouting above screaming, pissing children.
If the atmosphere did evoke the swamps and passion of the South, the service unfortunately did not. Lady Henrietta and I assumed our positions by the waiters’ pedestal to be seated, only to notice with disgust that said proles were emptying trays of festering bones into them in front of our eyes. I did my best to shield my lady’s eyes from the cruel sight with her veil, only to illicit a not-entirely-justified slap, which stung much like a honeybee upon the knee while swinging innocently from a bough in the height of a gruelling summer. In time, we found our own way to the tables, which were of a quality that I have not seen since my days as an ambassador in the Levant. Another interminable wait followed, whereupon I seized my Lady roughly by the arm, as masculine etiquette dictates and we reluctantly joined the multiple queues ahead. The floor was sticky and slightly soiled to the touch, but it did add an air of authenticity in its greasy feel.
In my mind, I had summoned up ravenous images of raspberry tartlets, drizzled balsamic vinegar, croutons tender to the touch, steaks suffused with ecstatic juices and Southern spices and the radiant taste of wine. I inquired about the house wine but was met with looks that bordered on shock. My dearest Lady Henrietta noticed that there was an option involving a bucket, and a serving-wench was duly dispatched to fetch the item, such was our unabated curiosity. We seized the bucket, and with child-like haste and joy ran back to the table and succumbed to our hunger with beast-like instinct. The joys at this simplistic food cannot be overstated. The skin of the chicken, moist to the touch, leaking a bountiful burst of oil at the slightest depression, soaked into the tongue and slipped easily down the throat like a scant-seasoned oyster on a moonlit night in Seville. The teasing way in which the skin separates from the flesh of the chicken is most pleasing to the eye, and Lady Henrietta found a renewed enthusiasm in discovering the explosive mix of flavours that could be reached by wrapping a chip in the greasy skin, and devouring it whole. A side order of barbecue sauce, for which we were grateful not to be charged, made us almost reach a gustatory climax of pleasure. For a brief moment, I felt almost as if an apparition of the South had appeared before me, as though I were making my way steadily westwards through the scrub as a wild-eyed pilgrim, my wood-carved belongings and sixteen children behind me, my trusty steeds afore, and my trusting Lady to my side. I lost myself in the moment, emitting a “Yee Hah!”, while my Lady Henrietta fell into a joy-induced coma and lay spreadeagled on the floor while small youths clad in athletic gear and waving knives as though partaking in a beautiful pagan ritual danced about her sprawled figure.
The bucket duly finished, I asked once again for a wine list, but noted rather disappointedly that only carbonated soft drinks were on offer. The strangely diluted version of House Coke was pleasing to the gut, and it layered itself with the oil in my stomach in a tumultuous but strangely alluring way. In the majestic simplicity of their offerings, they had indeed allowed me and my joy-maddened Lady to reach a short-aired peak of the senses, rivalling a tearful sunset on the Indian plains as viewed from a moving train wagon or the sheer beauty in innocence of a teen gang scrumping for apples and gently breaking the ribs of the prostrate–lying orchard-owner with their boots, as he looks on in awe and with the honour of the ages flickering in his slowly diminishing eyes.
I left the restaurant with a renewed spring in my step and a zest for life. Even without my Lady Henrietta of Balerno by my side - she was last seen boarding a cargo plane bound for Sudan - I still feel only gratitude for the direction that the simple grub of Alabama Fried Chicken has given me.
Next week: The Shettleston Cuban-themed restaurant Fidel Gastro gets the going over by Kiran and his new companion Lord Tarquin of the Antipodes. AA Gill is having his stomached pumped after he was accidentally served an eel filled with semen at a chip shop in Solihull.
Monday, 28 January 2008
Thursday, 17 January 2008
A Short Diversion
My flatmate recently wrote a song. A very talented individual he is indeed. Anyway, it prompted me to attempt a short story on the subject of said song – here is Part 1. Concludes whenever I get round to it…
Dave, hairbrush in hand, examined the light acne on his forehead in the wall-hung mirror. Thoughts of age, thoughts of spent youth, the clutter of the hours inching out the substance from his day-to-day life. And his Janus. Sapping from him on one hand and at the same moment giving to him an outstretched palm of riches, those he had yearned for and yet which had disappointed him in the finding.
He surged the focus of his eyes outward, turning from his own image to that projected of his Janus, sitting on the bed, brush also in her hand, in the pristine act of straightening the bedraggled dark hair, pensive and with an expression of suppressed pain on her face. This girl who co-habited, who seemed to watch him even as he startled his computer to life in the morning, who seemed to cast her reflection into the top of his tea, lunged at his thoughts mid-sentence. Her and her beautiful hair, and yet she had coaxed him gently in to their entanglement, and now wished to shun him.
She got up roughly from the bed, in the throws of routine, and sidled over to him. Thoughts flicked across of her transformation, an evening in a health spa, stupid green gunk lathered on her stupid unknowing face, cucumbers on the eyes, the faith-healing rays as spouted from the health therapist’s mouth, all this layered and layered in her mind, poisoning it, and she in turn poisoning him, the overspill, the victim. He watched her figure grow in the mirror, his hand had been steady for minutes, not one stroke of the brush, not one fidget or change in posture as he mused the banality. She placed her arms around him, embracing his shoulders, a gift of affection that she would cheaply trade with another. The bitch. How she hoarded her affections, doling them out like a miserly drip by a hospital bed, never overloading, tickling enough to set the itch in place and hiding the consoling scratch under the covers, withdrawn from his life until she saw fit.
He murmured a dead-pan phrase of affection, grunted almost. Spat the toothpaste into the sink, how long had that been in his mouth? A torrent of scolding, warnings, brooding advice and a loveless peck later and he was on the street, on the train, at his office building keypad, 3, 7, 4, 5, blink and in, at his desk, the tea swirling by his side, the monitor flashing up in front of him, ready to pilfer another eight hours from his egg-timed life. And still he thought about Janus, her loveless peck and her primary colour duvets and her stuffed animals and that kitten. The kitten, the bastard. His fingers tapped at the keyboard, piles of text inputted by ape-technology by an ape into an overlord database. We created that which we are in the mercy of. Faster, faster.
And then home. Older. He caught her at it again, kitten in hand, fondling it, bearing her cheek against it until they became a synthesis, one beautiful bedevilled girl, and one object, living but useless, somehow conditioning us to love it, to put its food before ours. That bastard kitten, it steals all her love from me. And that bitch, she throws all her love upon it, this object, almost inanimate.
“Why do you spend so much time with that fucking thing?”, he spat, before he had time to rein it in.
She shot him a glance, half in mock-fear as though he were some outraged wife-beater, half in contempt.
“This kitten loves me, it knows how I feel”, Janus said.
“It’s a ball of fur, it knows fuck all, and it is in my seat”, said Dave, voice calmed.
He nearly drowned in self-loathing then. The vicious words uttered at the end of a soulless day could be as lastingly wounding as a rusted sword and could never be taken back. And Janus, always the recipient. He directed his venom at the kitten though, it lay there mockingly, pride of place. Dave lazily poised his arse towards it, ready to sit, shadowing in like a sinking whale, and the kitten, growing wide-eyed and fearful, crawled slowly away, its claws snagging on the material of the sofa.
“Don’t talk to me when you get home from work, you’re a grouch, I don’t want to be near you”, she said, and she grasped the kitten, scooping it into her arms and whisking it and herself away to the bedroom. In her absence, Dave settled out suddenly on the couch, as if a spring had been uncoiled and his unfurling limbs had to find the extremities of their purpose. One day he would get that kitten. He would get her, if the kitten was an unknowing pawn in this wounding game of hate, then it too would pay the forfeit. After all it was only a kitten, he would get the better of it.
Three more day-cycles of dark and light grey and he lay on his hands in a rapidly spreading pool of beer at the ‘Leper and Prosthetic’, his oaken local. Across from him lay a far drunker Ronnie, looking through the encompassing mesh of his eyes at the pitiful figure opposite. Four hours of hearing Dave harp on about his woes had lead him into an alcoholic tailspin, throwing back drinks until they rivered in his throat as Dave looked on unaware, trapped in his own head, bouncing thoughts off the twisted mug of Ronnie. At one point he even downed a yard of ale, resting the bulb on Dave’s unflinching shoulder.
Ronnie glanced at his wristwatch. Two hands waved theatrically back at him, made a number of subtle movements and then scarpered from his vision. The time for action had come, he decided, it felt right.
“Look here!”, he shouted, pointing in his companion’s general direction. Dave lifted up his head and was poked immediately in the left eye, which began to weep.
“You have to do something about this err, fucking, err”
“Kitten?”
“No! The woman, you need to tame her, set her back on the straight and, and just sort yourself out!”, Ronnie continued drawing patterns in the air with his scolding finger, occasionally touching and streaking the tears on Dave’s face.
“You cannot get her back”, he continued, “Unless you eliminate the kitten. I told you this would happen, the fickle bitches, they will love anything, so long as it is furry.”
Dave looked down at his arms and mused that he was that furry at all, and then he wondered when Ronnie would be quiet again. He picked up the pool cue leaning next to his bench and poked idly at Ronnie’s shoulder to try and make him stop, but he simply went on, “Listen, you need to make her jealous. Have an affair, it doesn’t matter what with.”
Almost as his slurred words faded he found himself sat in front of the computer, the monitor off, bloodshot eyes in the black reflection, right arm under the table fumbling for the power button. He tried to recount the events following the conversation. Taxi home, or bicycle perhaps. Whose bicycle? The monk’s? Then at home, a kitchen knife, no, not a knife, too violent, just a chopstick. Oh my god, not Janus?! No, nothing like that, not murder, not last night, not on a Thursday. Chopstick in hand, gathering support, a smashed cabinet, shoulder-barged perhaps, he felt his shoulder, yes, tender, makes sense, but was this before or after. He looked down at the mouse. A mouse? What did he do with the chopstick? And then, fumbling around the bedroom, “Shhhh, be quiet, you’ll wake him!”
Wake what? Nothing to wake, no, not murder, but still chopstick in hand, lighter shadows now, outside, fumbling around, more broken glass, yes, the patio door, and then back in. Janus in a nightgown, nauseating pink, how it offends the eyes, like being microwaved. Then finding it. His finger, orbiting the power button for minutes, falls in the dimple and ignites the machine. Cast back to last night again, focus, the kitten, the chopstick through the eye. The screaming, from Janus, the wailing and mewling, from the kitten, and then drop-kicked into the street, and Janus fleeing, gowns billowing behind her like chasing candy floss, enwrapping, swaddling her.
“Jesus!”, screamed Dave, and he ejected his chair back behind him, knocking over some fucking co-worker or other, sunken and dead in the heart, and leapt down the stairs, back to his house. The street was cordoned off. Exhibit A, chopstick kitten, was being manhandled into a plastic bag. In the background a woman in the crowd wept audibly. Janus was nowhere to be seen, probably never would be. The street seemed desolate and cold, despite the wafting crowds. All looked on, policemen consoling each other, people shaking their heads in mute disbelief, anxiety, the ills of society personified in the man who could do this. The weight of the world lent their heavy presence to the scene, the deities hovered just above, receiving that kitten soul, that symbol of purity, destroyed with a human eating implement. Those were Dave’s favourite chopsticks as well. What, in his drunken mind, had aroused such carefree waste in him?
He wrapped his scarf tightly around his mouth and nose and sidled away, gently asphyxiating, moisture from his smoker’s cough beading the material inside, creating a warm must of tobacco scent. The flat being off-limits, he went back to his office, his only other place of the Known apart from the supermarket, though the cold aisles and spear-stares of Tesco did not appeal. In front of his desk, his felled co-worker lay barely moving, the odd twitch from the corner of her mouth betraying her living, people stepping over her reading faxes. Faxes. As he lowered his aching drunk-starved body onto the chair, he looked over at the supple curves of the fax machine. Its grey figure, silhouetted.
“Yes, fax machine”, he whispered, “You understand me”. Dave looked around and then rose slowly but shakily to his feet. Using minimum footsteps, soft to the carpeted floor, he approached the fax machine as his heart bounded within his shirted chest. “You understand me”, he dropped his tone further. He outstretched his hand and lightly patted the top. The machine beeped loudly and, startled, Dave fled back to his desk. The secretary watched him with one chameleon eye, the other focuses on “Heat” magazine in front of her, her obese face chewing like a cow in the ecstasies of pasture. She snorted gently as unknown bodies passed into her, salad, perhaps, or pine nuts.
Over the coming days, Dave progressed with his work at a stately pace, sidling over to the fax machine in his lunch breaks. Too scared to return to his sealed-off home, as the Chopstick Kitten Controversy hit the headlines somewhere beneath celebrity jail-breaks and above African civil wars, he set up hostel within the warming dividers and ring-binders of the stationery cupboard, ruminating with his mind in the early hours of the evening after the office closed as the dispiriting sound of vaccum cleaners and Eastern European voices echoed through the closed door.
During the day he would edge closer to the fax machine, making gestures to it, sometimes stopping to make small-talk. It responded nonchalantly at first, an idle beep here or whirring noise there, but as the days grew longer with the onset of another fusty summer, she too seemed to warm to him, sending him read receipts on hearing a joke, the fax machine equivalent of maniacal and true-boned laughter. It was in early May, when all in the office now avoided him and his five-month body-clung shirt and strangely Post-it-note-gum-smelling breath, that he dared once again to stroke the smooth, dusted, powder-grey surface of his love. The fax machine purred gently, various lights illuminating a captivating green and then extinguishing playfully like sudden-hid emeralds. Harbingers of a wealth awaiting persistence.
Dave first made love to the fax machine on Independence Day. He had coaxed it into the cupboard after the office drones had left to hasten home behind blinking brake lights to microwave Macaroni and watch X-Factor. A3 folders and staplers cascaded from the highest shelves, denting his dear fax machine and bruising his head, yet still he continued in the throws of passion. It seemed that his love would never end, that in this selfless apparition, this almost Holy sender of messages, a female Mercury, with her wings replaced with toner, her oral senses replaced with sensual buttons, and the throbbing muscles of the thighs replaced with heady electronic infusions pulsing through her circuit veins with the inexorable eagerness to spread the word of clients and suppliers alike, he had but glimpsed the figure atop the pedestal, and now that he had drunk from this cup, he would forever yearn for more. If only it could be like this forever, he thought, but already, boiling within him, a torrent of bile was urging his feelings away, trying in vain to prepare him for a fall that would have to come, for around the apex of ecstasy lies only monotonous plains, and the next peak may never be within sight or reach. As he staggered, drained, limp, from the stationery cupboard, fax machine in hand, he caught a wink from across the room. From the photocopier…
To be continued.
Dave, hairbrush in hand, examined the light acne on his forehead in the wall-hung mirror. Thoughts of age, thoughts of spent youth, the clutter of the hours inching out the substance from his day-to-day life. And his Janus. Sapping from him on one hand and at the same moment giving to him an outstretched palm of riches, those he had yearned for and yet which had disappointed him in the finding.
He surged the focus of his eyes outward, turning from his own image to that projected of his Janus, sitting on the bed, brush also in her hand, in the pristine act of straightening the bedraggled dark hair, pensive and with an expression of suppressed pain on her face. This girl who co-habited, who seemed to watch him even as he startled his computer to life in the morning, who seemed to cast her reflection into the top of his tea, lunged at his thoughts mid-sentence. Her and her beautiful hair, and yet she had coaxed him gently in to their entanglement, and now wished to shun him.
She got up roughly from the bed, in the throws of routine, and sidled over to him. Thoughts flicked across of her transformation, an evening in a health spa, stupid green gunk lathered on her stupid unknowing face, cucumbers on the eyes, the faith-healing rays as spouted from the health therapist’s mouth, all this layered and layered in her mind, poisoning it, and she in turn poisoning him, the overspill, the victim. He watched her figure grow in the mirror, his hand had been steady for minutes, not one stroke of the brush, not one fidget or change in posture as he mused the banality. She placed her arms around him, embracing his shoulders, a gift of affection that she would cheaply trade with another. The bitch. How she hoarded her affections, doling them out like a miserly drip by a hospital bed, never overloading, tickling enough to set the itch in place and hiding the consoling scratch under the covers, withdrawn from his life until she saw fit.
He murmured a dead-pan phrase of affection, grunted almost. Spat the toothpaste into the sink, how long had that been in his mouth? A torrent of scolding, warnings, brooding advice and a loveless peck later and he was on the street, on the train, at his office building keypad, 3, 7, 4, 5, blink and in, at his desk, the tea swirling by his side, the monitor flashing up in front of him, ready to pilfer another eight hours from his egg-timed life. And still he thought about Janus, her loveless peck and her primary colour duvets and her stuffed animals and that kitten. The kitten, the bastard. His fingers tapped at the keyboard, piles of text inputted by ape-technology by an ape into an overlord database. We created that which we are in the mercy of. Faster, faster.
And then home. Older. He caught her at it again, kitten in hand, fondling it, bearing her cheek against it until they became a synthesis, one beautiful bedevilled girl, and one object, living but useless, somehow conditioning us to love it, to put its food before ours. That bastard kitten, it steals all her love from me. And that bitch, she throws all her love upon it, this object, almost inanimate.
“Why do you spend so much time with that fucking thing?”, he spat, before he had time to rein it in.
She shot him a glance, half in mock-fear as though he were some outraged wife-beater, half in contempt.
“This kitten loves me, it knows how I feel”, Janus said.
“It’s a ball of fur, it knows fuck all, and it is in my seat”, said Dave, voice calmed.
He nearly drowned in self-loathing then. The vicious words uttered at the end of a soulless day could be as lastingly wounding as a rusted sword and could never be taken back. And Janus, always the recipient. He directed his venom at the kitten though, it lay there mockingly, pride of place. Dave lazily poised his arse towards it, ready to sit, shadowing in like a sinking whale, and the kitten, growing wide-eyed and fearful, crawled slowly away, its claws snagging on the material of the sofa.
“Don’t talk to me when you get home from work, you’re a grouch, I don’t want to be near you”, she said, and she grasped the kitten, scooping it into her arms and whisking it and herself away to the bedroom. In her absence, Dave settled out suddenly on the couch, as if a spring had been uncoiled and his unfurling limbs had to find the extremities of their purpose. One day he would get that kitten. He would get her, if the kitten was an unknowing pawn in this wounding game of hate, then it too would pay the forfeit. After all it was only a kitten, he would get the better of it.
Three more day-cycles of dark and light grey and he lay on his hands in a rapidly spreading pool of beer at the ‘Leper and Prosthetic’, his oaken local. Across from him lay a far drunker Ronnie, looking through the encompassing mesh of his eyes at the pitiful figure opposite. Four hours of hearing Dave harp on about his woes had lead him into an alcoholic tailspin, throwing back drinks until they rivered in his throat as Dave looked on unaware, trapped in his own head, bouncing thoughts off the twisted mug of Ronnie. At one point he even downed a yard of ale, resting the bulb on Dave’s unflinching shoulder.
Ronnie glanced at his wristwatch. Two hands waved theatrically back at him, made a number of subtle movements and then scarpered from his vision. The time for action had come, he decided, it felt right.
“Look here!”, he shouted, pointing in his companion’s general direction. Dave lifted up his head and was poked immediately in the left eye, which began to weep.
“You have to do something about this err, fucking, err”
“Kitten?”
“No! The woman, you need to tame her, set her back on the straight and, and just sort yourself out!”, Ronnie continued drawing patterns in the air with his scolding finger, occasionally touching and streaking the tears on Dave’s face.
“You cannot get her back”, he continued, “Unless you eliminate the kitten. I told you this would happen, the fickle bitches, they will love anything, so long as it is furry.”
Dave looked down at his arms and mused that he was that furry at all, and then he wondered when Ronnie would be quiet again. He picked up the pool cue leaning next to his bench and poked idly at Ronnie’s shoulder to try and make him stop, but he simply went on, “Listen, you need to make her jealous. Have an affair, it doesn’t matter what with.”
Almost as his slurred words faded he found himself sat in front of the computer, the monitor off, bloodshot eyes in the black reflection, right arm under the table fumbling for the power button. He tried to recount the events following the conversation. Taxi home, or bicycle perhaps. Whose bicycle? The monk’s? Then at home, a kitchen knife, no, not a knife, too violent, just a chopstick. Oh my god, not Janus?! No, nothing like that, not murder, not last night, not on a Thursday. Chopstick in hand, gathering support, a smashed cabinet, shoulder-barged perhaps, he felt his shoulder, yes, tender, makes sense, but was this before or after. He looked down at the mouse. A mouse? What did he do with the chopstick? And then, fumbling around the bedroom, “Shhhh, be quiet, you’ll wake him!”
Wake what? Nothing to wake, no, not murder, but still chopstick in hand, lighter shadows now, outside, fumbling around, more broken glass, yes, the patio door, and then back in. Janus in a nightgown, nauseating pink, how it offends the eyes, like being microwaved. Then finding it. His finger, orbiting the power button for minutes, falls in the dimple and ignites the machine. Cast back to last night again, focus, the kitten, the chopstick through the eye. The screaming, from Janus, the wailing and mewling, from the kitten, and then drop-kicked into the street, and Janus fleeing, gowns billowing behind her like chasing candy floss, enwrapping, swaddling her.
“Jesus!”, screamed Dave, and he ejected his chair back behind him, knocking over some fucking co-worker or other, sunken and dead in the heart, and leapt down the stairs, back to his house. The street was cordoned off. Exhibit A, chopstick kitten, was being manhandled into a plastic bag. In the background a woman in the crowd wept audibly. Janus was nowhere to be seen, probably never would be. The street seemed desolate and cold, despite the wafting crowds. All looked on, policemen consoling each other, people shaking their heads in mute disbelief, anxiety, the ills of society personified in the man who could do this. The weight of the world lent their heavy presence to the scene, the deities hovered just above, receiving that kitten soul, that symbol of purity, destroyed with a human eating implement. Those were Dave’s favourite chopsticks as well. What, in his drunken mind, had aroused such carefree waste in him?
He wrapped his scarf tightly around his mouth and nose and sidled away, gently asphyxiating, moisture from his smoker’s cough beading the material inside, creating a warm must of tobacco scent. The flat being off-limits, he went back to his office, his only other place of the Known apart from the supermarket, though the cold aisles and spear-stares of Tesco did not appeal. In front of his desk, his felled co-worker lay barely moving, the odd twitch from the corner of her mouth betraying her living, people stepping over her reading faxes. Faxes. As he lowered his aching drunk-starved body onto the chair, he looked over at the supple curves of the fax machine. Its grey figure, silhouetted.
“Yes, fax machine”, he whispered, “You understand me”. Dave looked around and then rose slowly but shakily to his feet. Using minimum footsteps, soft to the carpeted floor, he approached the fax machine as his heart bounded within his shirted chest. “You understand me”, he dropped his tone further. He outstretched his hand and lightly patted the top. The machine beeped loudly and, startled, Dave fled back to his desk. The secretary watched him with one chameleon eye, the other focuses on “Heat” magazine in front of her, her obese face chewing like a cow in the ecstasies of pasture. She snorted gently as unknown bodies passed into her, salad, perhaps, or pine nuts.
Over the coming days, Dave progressed with his work at a stately pace, sidling over to the fax machine in his lunch breaks. Too scared to return to his sealed-off home, as the Chopstick Kitten Controversy hit the headlines somewhere beneath celebrity jail-breaks and above African civil wars, he set up hostel within the warming dividers and ring-binders of the stationery cupboard, ruminating with his mind in the early hours of the evening after the office closed as the dispiriting sound of vaccum cleaners and Eastern European voices echoed through the closed door.
During the day he would edge closer to the fax machine, making gestures to it, sometimes stopping to make small-talk. It responded nonchalantly at first, an idle beep here or whirring noise there, but as the days grew longer with the onset of another fusty summer, she too seemed to warm to him, sending him read receipts on hearing a joke, the fax machine equivalent of maniacal and true-boned laughter. It was in early May, when all in the office now avoided him and his five-month body-clung shirt and strangely Post-it-note-gum-smelling breath, that he dared once again to stroke the smooth, dusted, powder-grey surface of his love. The fax machine purred gently, various lights illuminating a captivating green and then extinguishing playfully like sudden-hid emeralds. Harbingers of a wealth awaiting persistence.
Dave first made love to the fax machine on Independence Day. He had coaxed it into the cupboard after the office drones had left to hasten home behind blinking brake lights to microwave Macaroni and watch X-Factor. A3 folders and staplers cascaded from the highest shelves, denting his dear fax machine and bruising his head, yet still he continued in the throws of passion. It seemed that his love would never end, that in this selfless apparition, this almost Holy sender of messages, a female Mercury, with her wings replaced with toner, her oral senses replaced with sensual buttons, and the throbbing muscles of the thighs replaced with heady electronic infusions pulsing through her circuit veins with the inexorable eagerness to spread the word of clients and suppliers alike, he had but glimpsed the figure atop the pedestal, and now that he had drunk from this cup, he would forever yearn for more. If only it could be like this forever, he thought, but already, boiling within him, a torrent of bile was urging his feelings away, trying in vain to prepare him for a fall that would have to come, for around the apex of ecstasy lies only monotonous plains, and the next peak may never be within sight or reach. As he staggered, drained, limp, from the stationery cupboard, fax machine in hand, he caught a wink from across the room. From the photocopier…
To be continued.
Monday, 14 January 2008
Off The Campaign Trail
A belated Happy New Year. Though for at least a fifth of the human race, my greetings in fact come early. The Year of the Rat does not officially begin until the 7th of February.
But let's move on. About three years ago, a seventy year old Hunter S. Thompson shot himself in the head while relatives waited patiently in the next room for him to return from some errand or other. His ashes, as befitted his eccentric nature, were fired from a cannon of his own design. He is better known as the author of the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, later turned into a film starring Johnny Depp. Whatever your impression of that book and film and the character portrayed, albeit with some embellishment, make no mistake about the journalistic credentials of the late Mr. Thompson.
In these fevered times, therefore, I heartily recommend Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, written in 1972 when the likes of Richard Nixon and George McGovern were running for the presidential nomination. Thompson’s prose is punchy and violent, he lurches from topic to topic at a head-swimming pace while dragging the reader screaming between hazy flashback and face-slapping present, all the while turning out brutal phrases as if his survival depended on his stapling them to page. Which may of course have been true. What can be more difficult to reconcile is the gaping void between his materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle, and his liberal, underdog championing and genuine compassion for the afflictions that plagues early seventies America. Perhaps it was a genuine attempt at horizon-broadening. His aggressive cynicism never seems forced, however, and he literally transmits unhindered thought from mind to page, without the literary garnish that can so often be appended as an after-thought in political writing.
Much of the charm lies in the anecdotes that are littered in the text, and of the heavily first-person narrative which came to define the ‘gonzo’ style of journalism that was his creation. Often the flowing prose reduces to snapshots and bullet-points, as even his thoughts on the labour that the book was becoming became sprawled onto the page. What is amazing is how the year-long agony of turkey sandwiches, chicken coop-style, flatulence-filled domestic flights and resonating rhetoric is recounted with humour, and even the most banal observation is portrayed with a refreshing urgency and is brought into context. The dashes of creative writing that were also the hallmark of Thompson, when journalism occasionally tired him, are also evident. Only he could have been incarcerated in this Groundhog Day scenario and had the impulse to reflect that perhaps the eccentric behaviour of one weak candidate could be attributed to a hallucinogenic drug from West Africa called Ibogaine.
His cynicism was not the acerbic tongue of an angry young man desperate to make a splash, but instead that of a weary commentator, hoping that with enough force some of the underlying message might eke into his readers. While he saw the farce unfold in front of him and relished in carnival-write-ups of the intricacies – madmen hijacking campaign trains, gatecrashing the right-wing elite in Republican conferences while wearing an opposing candidate’s badge, attaching rows of stolen hotel keys to the baggage cabins in the journalists’ aircraft so that they jangle on take-off, for example – he always takes time to come back to earth to make us aware of the seismic importance of what is at stake - some achievement for a writer ensconced in the bleak desolation that must face those following the arduous campaign trail to effectively re-type press releases. Of course the book is not perfect. Thompson’s staccato-style can be his undoing, making the text unreadable and frustrating at times, and his well-placed suspicion can appear to border into unbridled hatred at times, but overall it is a very amusing and informative read from an active and focused mind, and very topical.
Which brings us neatly to the present campaign trail, now setting out in earnest having gathered people into a frenzy in Iowa and New Hampshire, and now aligning South Carolina in its comprehensively destructive sights. To us Brits, the circus mewling across the pond can smack a little of the stereotypically extravagant Game Show-style posturing we think we should expect from our American neighbours. Politics in the UK is more obviously portrayed as a no-brainer, reduced down like a dying stock cube into a generally dull liquid malaise of pissy comments at the despatch box, white lies about spending and taxes that can be undone with a calculator, and podium-climbing wearing banners emblazoned with large-sounding numbers which diminish rapidly when put in the context of a 60 million population – spending £3 billion on the NHS amounts to £50 per person, far less than it costs to put in a filling. There is sloganeering, of course, but in reality there are at least token safeguards that occasionally out the truth. The cap on election spending, an inquiring press and an incredulous and cynical public all help.
In the United States, donations to campaigns are unrestricted, and the amount that can be spent by candidates is only limited by the comparative wealth of the candidate and his or her campaign coffers. Hence ludicrous stunts to plea for money that can border on the insane, such as the candidate who in June last year asked supporters to give £23 to his campaign. “Why £23?” asked a journalist who was clearly the spokesperson for a thousand lips at that rally, “Why not?” answered the politician, unfazed. It is sobering to reflect that since the Second World War, the party that has invested more in their presidential campaign has always won.
Allegiance to the political parties in the States is more akin to your blood group at birth. You are born Republican or you are born Democrat, and those of an extreme nature and a penchant for free thought can register themselves as ‘Independents’, and presumably run the risk of being labelled as heretics. The Primaries aim to have a one presidential candidate elected to run for office in each party. This is a strange concept, it means that for an entire year, both presidential parties tear themselves apart, almost as much as they tear into each other. In Britain, the concept of the ‘coronation’ of Gordon Brown was viewed as being preferable to a mud-slinging internal haemorrhaging of the Labour party, whilst in the States, the latter concept is enshrined in the electoral system. It is as if every five years, your party becomes a mentally-unstable individual forced to undergo a programme of schizophrenic self-promotion of its multiple personalities, all the while each personality publicly defaming the others, before forcing nine-tenths of itself to commit suicide and then make its way to the roof of the asylum where a similar individual awaits his chance to duel you.
The effect on the public is probably just as nauseating. Imagine this. Awaking after being absorbed in some candy floss-wrapped nightmare, smothered and smothered with woolly action-phrases and political grand-standing until you writhe from your bed, sweating, dishevelled and unbalanced from the tortures the lecherous candidates residing in your brain inflicted in sleep, you spit red, white and blue confetti from your mouth and stagger for that glass of water that will make it all go away. Only it won’t. This ludicrous spectacle will, like the overdrawn Highland Festival of the Arts, last for an entire year. Day after day the message, whatever that might be, will be rammed down your throat until you choke; your Adam’s apple, should you possess one, bobbing up and down in rage. The hands of the politicians tighten on your throats, “It’s not us, it’s you” they fawn, “This is about you, elect us, for you”, and then the tears come to your eyes, you lose the power of thought, and then you may settle to your default, your upbringing that tells you that you must vote left or right, or maybe you may pick one policy out of the air, something that you saw on the side of the campaign bus, or something that some political commentator or candidate happened to mutter while you flicked between “Sex and the City” and an infomercial on cross-trainers that will give you thighs like tree-trunks so that you can give that Iraqi a hiding should he parachute down on your Indiana town’s sheriff’s office and try and peek a gander at your Susie’s ankles. Eventually the whole spectacle becomes so tiresome, in the same way heroin wrenches your dopamine receptors ajar so that you can no longer feel pleasure or normality, and you go for the candidate with the nicest smile, or who uses the most awe-capturing speech-written words, or who believes in creationism, or who says the word “America” often enough. Or perhaps you will attack the whole thing in a more negative manner. Not voting for the person who tripped while walking up to the podium (you want a strong leader), or whose middle name is the same as the surname of an ousted Middle Eastern dictator, or who mispronounced Minneapolis during an ill-timed rally speech.
This is not to undermine the intelligence of the American people to choose a candidate based on their actual policies, it is just that the Primaries are based on such a superficial foundation that it is hard for these policies to be heard above the jamborees, fist-shaking, zombie-cheering, sensationalism and general information overload. The turkey cannot comprehend what a great meal it will make for the lingering taste of sage and onion stuffing in it’s mouth (apologies, I am a poor cook).
The Primaries even has a day called ‘Super Tuesday’ for God’s sake. If I were to actually live in the States, I would have to put an axe through my television screen lest my eyeballs fall out from election-exposure and loll about like those joke glasses with the slinky-springs and I would have to live in the corner of a KFC stuffing drumsticks, bone and all, into my mouth and dribbling my sentiments on Third World Debt to passers-by.
Under this kind of duress, even Noam Chomsky might be persuaded in a red-eyed insomniac moment of duress to vote a fictional fairy called Chantelle from an animated series about a said fictional fairy who was too close to a radiation leak on Three Mile Island and developed super-powers when donning a cape, touring the barbarous and savage world beyond the Bosphorus to spread her message of democracy and freedom using here Magical Cluster Bomb of Love. I half expect a CGI overlay of Lara Croft to link arms with Barack Obama during his next rally, just to up his campaign’s sex appeal among Ivy League college students.
The policies are not being heard, they are being hidden by falsified promises with as much content as a burned encyclopaedia. There has been much great journalism and this has helped clarify the respective candidate’s positions when their own knotted tongues are delicately patting our head with newspeak, and much of this journalism has followed the well-worn path of satire. But while the candidates and their campaign-styles have been ridiculed by the press, as I would do in the same situation, there seems to be little reflection that the monstrous process, has shoe-horned candidates into this way of campaigning, and that the general public is bored past caring beyond the toothpaste that each uses to get that glittering smile. The process itself is probably a result of the ratcheting up of the superficial nature of each contest with the passing years, but I doubt that there is anyone, candidate, journalist, or member of the public alike, that would condone this manner of campaigning were they to be asked.
Basing a presidential campaign with global consequences almost entirely on personality alone is as vacuous as holding a Big Brother-style phone-in, choosing someone on likeability alone, to elect a solution-provider for the electoral strife in Kenya, or the turbulence in Pakistan, or the only sporadically remembered events in Darfur. This would be only an analogy if it were not so directly close to the truth. The real problem with this shallow appeal for popularity is that it stands at the centre of the process to elect the President of the United States. The American government is an extrovert government ruling over an introverted population. The government may have jurisdiction over 4% of the population of the Earth, and may only be elected by an even smaller fraction, but it impacts directly on the entire world. When Bush beat Kerry in the last election, we drowning our sorrows in the pub in London felt that we should have been given the opportunity to vote out the ranch-golfing, oil-junkie out. We all should have had that opportunity, every person on Earth.
Vying for the award of most sickening moment on the still new-born campaign trail of 2008 must be the partial break-down of Hilary Clinton in front of the press between the Iowa Primary and the New Hampshire Caucus. Elsewhere, had it been outed as a cynical method for a perceived emotionless droid to win votes, it would have tainted the race. In this case, Hilary received rapturous applause before the tears had even dried from her cheeks. “A master-stroke of electioneering!”, they must have swooned. Is it possible that this performance had a part to play in the reversal of her fortunes in the subsequent New Hampshire vote? And if so, does this not confirm everything that has been written about the nature of this contest with as much to do with real political decisions and policies as Crufts? It is wrong, I realise, to single out Mrs Clinton in this way, all are guilty, but it is merely an example that springs to mind.
What is missing, despite all the level-headed and gently entertaining journalism that the contest is attracting, is a really creative look at the forces at play, how they will affect society, and what those petty occurrences combined with education from political anecdotes from the past mean to the bigger picture. Hunter S. Thomson did not lose his sense of indignance at the motions of American politics and its impact on the world right up until his last days. As recently as 2003 he labelled George W. Bush a “whore beast”, language that other political commentators such as John Simpson would surely have shied away from, to put it mildly. What Thomson would have made of the current spectacle now unfolding across the Atlantic would have been, for those lucky enough to make the rewarding dive into his rich and inquisitive mind, very instructive.
But let's move on. About three years ago, a seventy year old Hunter S. Thompson shot himself in the head while relatives waited patiently in the next room for him to return from some errand or other. His ashes, as befitted his eccentric nature, were fired from a cannon of his own design. He is better known as the author of the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, later turned into a film starring Johnny Depp. Whatever your impression of that book and film and the character portrayed, albeit with some embellishment, make no mistake about the journalistic credentials of the late Mr. Thompson.
In these fevered times, therefore, I heartily recommend Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, written in 1972 when the likes of Richard Nixon and George McGovern were running for the presidential nomination. Thompson’s prose is punchy and violent, he lurches from topic to topic at a head-swimming pace while dragging the reader screaming between hazy flashback and face-slapping present, all the while turning out brutal phrases as if his survival depended on his stapling them to page. Which may of course have been true. What can be more difficult to reconcile is the gaping void between his materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle, and his liberal, underdog championing and genuine compassion for the afflictions that plagues early seventies America. Perhaps it was a genuine attempt at horizon-broadening. His aggressive cynicism never seems forced, however, and he literally transmits unhindered thought from mind to page, without the literary garnish that can so often be appended as an after-thought in political writing.
Much of the charm lies in the anecdotes that are littered in the text, and of the heavily first-person narrative which came to define the ‘gonzo’ style of journalism that was his creation. Often the flowing prose reduces to snapshots and bullet-points, as even his thoughts on the labour that the book was becoming became sprawled onto the page. What is amazing is how the year-long agony of turkey sandwiches, chicken coop-style, flatulence-filled domestic flights and resonating rhetoric is recounted with humour, and even the most banal observation is portrayed with a refreshing urgency and is brought into context. The dashes of creative writing that were also the hallmark of Thompson, when journalism occasionally tired him, are also evident. Only he could have been incarcerated in this Groundhog Day scenario and had the impulse to reflect that perhaps the eccentric behaviour of one weak candidate could be attributed to a hallucinogenic drug from West Africa called Ibogaine.
His cynicism was not the acerbic tongue of an angry young man desperate to make a splash, but instead that of a weary commentator, hoping that with enough force some of the underlying message might eke into his readers. While he saw the farce unfold in front of him and relished in carnival-write-ups of the intricacies – madmen hijacking campaign trains, gatecrashing the right-wing elite in Republican conferences while wearing an opposing candidate’s badge, attaching rows of stolen hotel keys to the baggage cabins in the journalists’ aircraft so that they jangle on take-off, for example – he always takes time to come back to earth to make us aware of the seismic importance of what is at stake - some achievement for a writer ensconced in the bleak desolation that must face those following the arduous campaign trail to effectively re-type press releases. Of course the book is not perfect. Thompson’s staccato-style can be his undoing, making the text unreadable and frustrating at times, and his well-placed suspicion can appear to border into unbridled hatred at times, but overall it is a very amusing and informative read from an active and focused mind, and very topical.
Which brings us neatly to the present campaign trail, now setting out in earnest having gathered people into a frenzy in Iowa and New Hampshire, and now aligning South Carolina in its comprehensively destructive sights. To us Brits, the circus mewling across the pond can smack a little of the stereotypically extravagant Game Show-style posturing we think we should expect from our American neighbours. Politics in the UK is more obviously portrayed as a no-brainer, reduced down like a dying stock cube into a generally dull liquid malaise of pissy comments at the despatch box, white lies about spending and taxes that can be undone with a calculator, and podium-climbing wearing banners emblazoned with large-sounding numbers which diminish rapidly when put in the context of a 60 million population – spending £3 billion on the NHS amounts to £50 per person, far less than it costs to put in a filling. There is sloganeering, of course, but in reality there are at least token safeguards that occasionally out the truth. The cap on election spending, an inquiring press and an incredulous and cynical public all help.
In the United States, donations to campaigns are unrestricted, and the amount that can be spent by candidates is only limited by the comparative wealth of the candidate and his or her campaign coffers. Hence ludicrous stunts to plea for money that can border on the insane, such as the candidate who in June last year asked supporters to give £23 to his campaign. “Why £23?” asked a journalist who was clearly the spokesperson for a thousand lips at that rally, “Why not?” answered the politician, unfazed. It is sobering to reflect that since the Second World War, the party that has invested more in their presidential campaign has always won.
Allegiance to the political parties in the States is more akin to your blood group at birth. You are born Republican or you are born Democrat, and those of an extreme nature and a penchant for free thought can register themselves as ‘Independents’, and presumably run the risk of being labelled as heretics. The Primaries aim to have a one presidential candidate elected to run for office in each party. This is a strange concept, it means that for an entire year, both presidential parties tear themselves apart, almost as much as they tear into each other. In Britain, the concept of the ‘coronation’ of Gordon Brown was viewed as being preferable to a mud-slinging internal haemorrhaging of the Labour party, whilst in the States, the latter concept is enshrined in the electoral system. It is as if every five years, your party becomes a mentally-unstable individual forced to undergo a programme of schizophrenic self-promotion of its multiple personalities, all the while each personality publicly defaming the others, before forcing nine-tenths of itself to commit suicide and then make its way to the roof of the asylum where a similar individual awaits his chance to duel you.
The effect on the public is probably just as nauseating. Imagine this. Awaking after being absorbed in some candy floss-wrapped nightmare, smothered and smothered with woolly action-phrases and political grand-standing until you writhe from your bed, sweating, dishevelled and unbalanced from the tortures the lecherous candidates residing in your brain inflicted in sleep, you spit red, white and blue confetti from your mouth and stagger for that glass of water that will make it all go away. Only it won’t. This ludicrous spectacle will, like the overdrawn Highland Festival of the Arts, last for an entire year. Day after day the message, whatever that might be, will be rammed down your throat until you choke; your Adam’s apple, should you possess one, bobbing up and down in rage. The hands of the politicians tighten on your throats, “It’s not us, it’s you” they fawn, “This is about you, elect us, for you”, and then the tears come to your eyes, you lose the power of thought, and then you may settle to your default, your upbringing that tells you that you must vote left or right, or maybe you may pick one policy out of the air, something that you saw on the side of the campaign bus, or something that some political commentator or candidate happened to mutter while you flicked between “Sex and the City” and an infomercial on cross-trainers that will give you thighs like tree-trunks so that you can give that Iraqi a hiding should he parachute down on your Indiana town’s sheriff’s office and try and peek a gander at your Susie’s ankles. Eventually the whole spectacle becomes so tiresome, in the same way heroin wrenches your dopamine receptors ajar so that you can no longer feel pleasure or normality, and you go for the candidate with the nicest smile, or who uses the most awe-capturing speech-written words, or who believes in creationism, or who says the word “America” often enough. Or perhaps you will attack the whole thing in a more negative manner. Not voting for the person who tripped while walking up to the podium (you want a strong leader), or whose middle name is the same as the surname of an ousted Middle Eastern dictator, or who mispronounced Minneapolis during an ill-timed rally speech.
This is not to undermine the intelligence of the American people to choose a candidate based on their actual policies, it is just that the Primaries are based on such a superficial foundation that it is hard for these policies to be heard above the jamborees, fist-shaking, zombie-cheering, sensationalism and general information overload. The turkey cannot comprehend what a great meal it will make for the lingering taste of sage and onion stuffing in it’s mouth (apologies, I am a poor cook).
The Primaries even has a day called ‘Super Tuesday’ for God’s sake. If I were to actually live in the States, I would have to put an axe through my television screen lest my eyeballs fall out from election-exposure and loll about like those joke glasses with the slinky-springs and I would have to live in the corner of a KFC stuffing drumsticks, bone and all, into my mouth and dribbling my sentiments on Third World Debt to passers-by.
Under this kind of duress, even Noam Chomsky might be persuaded in a red-eyed insomniac moment of duress to vote a fictional fairy called Chantelle from an animated series about a said fictional fairy who was too close to a radiation leak on Three Mile Island and developed super-powers when donning a cape, touring the barbarous and savage world beyond the Bosphorus to spread her message of democracy and freedom using here Magical Cluster Bomb of Love. I half expect a CGI overlay of Lara Croft to link arms with Barack Obama during his next rally, just to up his campaign’s sex appeal among Ivy League college students.
The policies are not being heard, they are being hidden by falsified promises with as much content as a burned encyclopaedia. There has been much great journalism and this has helped clarify the respective candidate’s positions when their own knotted tongues are delicately patting our head with newspeak, and much of this journalism has followed the well-worn path of satire. But while the candidates and their campaign-styles have been ridiculed by the press, as I would do in the same situation, there seems to be little reflection that the monstrous process, has shoe-horned candidates into this way of campaigning, and that the general public is bored past caring beyond the toothpaste that each uses to get that glittering smile. The process itself is probably a result of the ratcheting up of the superficial nature of each contest with the passing years, but I doubt that there is anyone, candidate, journalist, or member of the public alike, that would condone this manner of campaigning were they to be asked.
Basing a presidential campaign with global consequences almost entirely on personality alone is as vacuous as holding a Big Brother-style phone-in, choosing someone on likeability alone, to elect a solution-provider for the electoral strife in Kenya, or the turbulence in Pakistan, or the only sporadically remembered events in Darfur. This would be only an analogy if it were not so directly close to the truth. The real problem with this shallow appeal for popularity is that it stands at the centre of the process to elect the President of the United States. The American government is an extrovert government ruling over an introverted population. The government may have jurisdiction over 4% of the population of the Earth, and may only be elected by an even smaller fraction, but it impacts directly on the entire world. When Bush beat Kerry in the last election, we drowning our sorrows in the pub in London felt that we should have been given the opportunity to vote out the ranch-golfing, oil-junkie out. We all should have had that opportunity, every person on Earth.
Vying for the award of most sickening moment on the still new-born campaign trail of 2008 must be the partial break-down of Hilary Clinton in front of the press between the Iowa Primary and the New Hampshire Caucus. Elsewhere, had it been outed as a cynical method for a perceived emotionless droid to win votes, it would have tainted the race. In this case, Hilary received rapturous applause before the tears had even dried from her cheeks. “A master-stroke of electioneering!”, they must have swooned. Is it possible that this performance had a part to play in the reversal of her fortunes in the subsequent New Hampshire vote? And if so, does this not confirm everything that has been written about the nature of this contest with as much to do with real political decisions and policies as Crufts? It is wrong, I realise, to single out Mrs Clinton in this way, all are guilty, but it is merely an example that springs to mind.
What is missing, despite all the level-headed and gently entertaining journalism that the contest is attracting, is a really creative look at the forces at play, how they will affect society, and what those petty occurrences combined with education from political anecdotes from the past mean to the bigger picture. Hunter S. Thomson did not lose his sense of indignance at the motions of American politics and its impact on the world right up until his last days. As recently as 2003 he labelled George W. Bush a “whore beast”, language that other political commentators such as John Simpson would surely have shied away from, to put it mildly. What Thomson would have made of the current spectacle now unfolding across the Atlantic would have been, for those lucky enough to make the rewarding dive into his rich and inquisitive mind, very instructive.
Whilst indeed a year will elapse between the start of the primaries at New Year and the eventual presidential elections, the contest for the nomination is likely to be decided in large part on Super Tuesday, 5th February 2008, when 22 states will cast their votes. In any case, by March it is almost certain that the identities of the Democratic and Republican candidates will be known, though caucuses continue into June. The fact that the parade of party conventions and mud-slinging will continue until next year will be incidental to those voters who, having influenced the outcome earlier in the year, choose to hibernate in their panic rooms, nuclear bunkers or missile-proof SUV's in a vain bid to escape the lasting medical effects of political over-exposure. For the record, most of us Brits don't mind what populist contortions you find necessary to endure to arrive at the answer of who should lead your country and mop up the eight years of spilt excrement that has touched every continent. Just please, for fuck's sake, get it right this time.
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