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Trump, Fake News, Gonzo Society & a series of Unfortunate Satirical Events.

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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"You Brits", 2016 Election, Alinsky, America Today, British Airways, Comedy, Democrat, Doors of Perception, Fake News, Gonzo, Harvard Lampoon, Hogarth, Hunter S Thomson, Intersectionality, Jewish Global Conspiracy, Lakota Sioux, LSD, Matt Monroe, Moliere, Moore's Law, My Favourite Year, National Lampoon, New World, Nixon, Old World, Pentagon Papers, Pizza Paedophile Ring, PJ O Rourke, Radicalism, Relativism, Republican, Ridicule, Rowlandson, Rules For Radicals, Satire, Saturday Night Live, Social Media, Sy Benson, Trump, Watergate, You never cut funny!

AKA Trump, The Gonzo President.

An hour in the company of PJ O Rourke – iconoclast, much lauded author of the seminal Republican Party Reptile, contemporary of Hunter S Thomson, man of letters, polemicist, contrarian – and of course the near mythical voice of some legendary BA adverts that wrote themselves into our cultural mythology with that laconic opening statement: “You Brits!”

The Theme for the gathering – a TortoiseMedia-eye look at America Today in the space between Presidential conceding and inauguration. Rich pickings indeed.

What’s not to like.

PJ O Rourke is a hero, the meeting of which can be a precarious thing at the best of times, as James Harding, Tortoise co-founder and our host rightly pointed out. But we were in safe hands. Mr Harding’s effortless steerage allowed us to hang out in our PJs if you will, consuming PJs warm yet remorseless observations without said meeting popping the heroic balloon.

The hour was spent walking the tightrope between PJ’s ability to infuse Zoom with the smoky,  peaty warmth of an antique Chesterfield chair and the frothy opinion and polemic bubbling up in the chat stream at the expense of the departing POTUS . 

What does the lampooning and highly satirical Republican-ish writer PJ O Rourke think of The Yellow Hair?  [my imagined Lakota Sioux name for said POTUS].

A proponent of Gonzo Journalism, this was the man who famously wrote on “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.” He also notably served as Editor-in-Chief of National Lampoon for many years with his imprint on many National Lampoon classics. His room for satirical manoeuvre was vast.  

And then it hit me – the fact that a master of Yan-kee satire and lampooning would be discussing a political culture of shifting-sand sensibilities underwritten by fatuous and sometimes almost wilfully funny untruths struck me as ironic at best, or at worse, a conflict of interest. 

This tension felt like it deserved a little more poking.  

To most people outside the U.S., and a rather large number inside, American Politics feels like it has been hijacked by the writers of National Lampoon and The Onion – with a smattering of H R Puff N Stuff and The King Of Kings screenplay bringing in the wings. At the heart of it all? Fake News – a master class in obfuscation. Everything is Fake, unless the Real President says otherwise, with @realDonaldTrump playing a pungent role in the Real Fake divide. Madonna or Maradonna? You decide.

Fake News – ridiculous flights of factual fictions, fantasies and potential conspiracies –  all liberally doused with the petrol of incensed ‘values-based’ hurt and ‘spiritual’ mortification. As the American master Mark Twain proclaimed:  ‘Why let the truth get in the way of a real story.’ Amen! Each new ‘real’ news story is  another tongue placed firmly in 330 Million or so American cheeks – and all the while POTUS gleefully flicking off the critical flies with pronouncements of ‘Fake News.’

Fake News feels so, well, American.  The right to shape any truth, fact, system, person, group, taste, belief, or data point in your own inimitable and highly subjective image feels more than just human. It feels like a goddam’ amendment in the constitution of all that is American.

Hunter S Thomson summed it up thus in his seminal Gonzo tome, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

‘But what was the story?

Nobody had bothered to say.

So we would have to drum it up on our own.

Free enterprise. The American Dream.’

Damn right. The Right to live out a Truman-show life under God & Fake News feels pretty damn good. Throw in a Rifle and I’ll pay the damn sub RIGHT NOW – in dark web crypto-currency of course, so those long-haired, bean-shoot-smokin, pinko sons-of-bitches can’t trace me. Hell yeah. I’m a Boy and Proud of it. Get me?

When the fact that the greatest political satire is real life – when everything is Fake, up is down, black is white, left is right, sex isn’t gender, fixed is fluid, everything’s a meme and the question of ‘how did we get here?’ gets begged – my tuppence-worth of an observation is this.

In the old courtly world, high satire was exactly that: the rarified and vaunted art of the rapier strike – of barbed projectiles of intelligent drollery fired against the pustular buffooning of royals, aristocrats and their petite bourgeoisie henchmen, with a liberal dose of mockery reserved for the sprawling, brawling plebiscite. 

But in the New World – the land of opportunity –  where every man was equal under God [though not the women – and…uhm…oh, yes, those dark skinned folks and any Native Indians we haven’t killed or filed under D for Destitution – just saying] – everyone should be allowed to play. Why just let the nobs of Nob Hill have all of the fun. 

Cue the heady days of the 60s and 70s. American polemicists took the spirit of free speech and the people’s right to voice their disdains, loathings, suspicions and truths to a whole new level. In the social splintering of the politicised Beat Generation and with the late Sixties agitprop movements came a new wave of satirists and lampooners with a much more audacious and ambitious sense of their audience. Hell, if a washing powder can change the behaviours [and underwear colour] of millions of Americans through television – just think what we might achieve. 

Mid West college kids, East Coast ingenues and West Coast dilettantes, growing up on the mass-market all you-can-eat-buffet of the American Dream, got busy. And they got tooled up. They armed themselves with Satire. What’s more, they got populist. [For the people by the people. How could they not. The whole point of propaganda, whether to stop a war, a politician, or a bunch of racists, is to inflame a reaction in the hearts and minds of as many people as possible as often as possible for as long as possible. Ridicule became the power tool of their populist propaganda.. 

Serious political discourse and posturing was already in full flight across most US college campuses. Over arch and deeply myopic, radicalism, was the order of the day and it had ‘rules’ as Saul Alinsky so clearly set out. This modern radical agenda and its propagandas cut deeply into the fresh-faced self-serving idealism of the existing New World elites. But it would always be a throw-back from the old world that would cut deepest. And that throw back was Ridicule. 

Ridicule, an art practised slavishly and to a higher order in the Old World of the 17th and 18th Centuries was, once again, to threaten the power elites of the New World. The using of formal and informal fallacies and fakeries to undermine someone or their argument – to make a mockery of their position or beliefs and in that way disavow them of any credibility, credulity or integrity – was to have a U.S. make-over.

As a weapon, Ridcule, designed to wither and erode the very foundations upon which someone stood, was remorseless and relentless. Ridicule is engineered to destroy the essence of the thing it targets. Forensic. Calculated. Cruel. 

The new satirical U.S. version was simply the old Ridicule dressed up in a goofy Matt Monroe jumper.

In playground terms, National Lampoon magazine could be said to have ‘started it’. Originally the Harvard Lampoon, NL parodied, mocked and ridiculed everything and everyone. In that way it was VERY egalitarian.

In it we can find perhaps a ground zero – a crucible moment – in a Gonzo to Fake News trajectory theory.

True Facts, one of the magazine’s cornerstone pieces and in fact the only factual part of the whole rag, used such bizarre obtuse and ridiculous pieces of real news from around the world that reality, even when it was in evidence, was barely distinguishable from ridiculous madness and satirical surreality.

It is at this point that the connection between Gonzo Journalism and Fake News becomes clearer for me. In that moment, where reality and the ridiculous were purposefully blurred beyond comprehension, the possibility of a Gonzo society became an unsettling reality.

In that effect, I believe that for all the good they did, and for all the rotten edifices they collapsed, the arch lampooners and satirists have at least a little to answer for in regard to to the polluting and toxic nature of what we now call Fake News.

The multiplier in all of this? The steroid of mass media – the exponential reach and influence of Television and the Movies.

Hot on its heels of National Lampoon came the fire-starter of Saturday Night Live. From its inauguration in 1975, SNL packed and wrapped ridicule for mass American consumption. By the mid-to-late seventies it was a seed-bed of cultish satirical showmanship. 

Between National Lampoon, SNL and all the subsequent mischief makers they spawned [The Onion being a notable example], the intelligent populist, comedic contrarian and anarcho-satirist had the opportunity to fire their ire into millions of homes via both printed piece and the cathode ray. What’s not to like?  

The small flaw in the blessed trajectory?

If everything is ridiculous, then nothing is serious – and more importantly, nothing is sacrosanct. There are no safe places or secure vaults of immutable truths and irreversible facts. Relativistic trick-cycling allowed anyone to present even the most rigorously tested or peer reviewed truth or fact as open to disdainful disregard or suspicion. Nothing can be fixed. Everything is fluid. Everything suffers a Borderline Personality Disorder. 

In a culture still mostly raised on the biblical trope of Let him that is without sin cast the first stone, the idea that any flaw whatsoever disavows you of being able to stand in serious and sometimes punitive judgement of a belief, moral code or political position, satire is more than just an intellectual foil, it is an instrument of faith. When that happens, you’re effectively fucked.

Everything is flawed – ergo – it does not have the untainted status, permission or the credibility to ever take higher ground or present an unassailable position, framing fact or truth.  In that instance, everything is relative and nothing is what it seems, to the person or persons ‘seeming’ it at least. So any and every thing can be ridiculed, undermined and summarily dismissed with no right to reply. Sound familiar?

The satirist and the lampooners power to pull down edifices of bullshit, self interest, political filibustering, outright deception and lying changed the face of massed political debate and its accompanying sophistry, in some cases irrevocably, removing its cloak or invisibility and invincibility completely. 

More recently, Social Media has simply accelerated the whole kit and caboodle – leaving us with Radical Pamphleteering to the power of Moore’s Law.

People under the cosh of power elites have always seen potential witchery and devilry in those above and beyond them. Unknown darkness and debauch in the big houses and the strange ways of those who Have have always been with us. And elites have always attracted suspicion, with wild stories of their excesses and self interest [often true] used as propaganda to bring them down. Put that sensibility into the New World and the land of Salem Witch Trials and the Pilgrim suspicions of the excesses of Mammon and, well – light blue touch paper and stand well back.  Conspiracy theories have always existed. But as with any fact or ‘truth’ generally, pop a conspiracy theory into the super-fly, deep-fat-frier of investigative gonzo journalism to the power of social media and shazaam, Bob’s your slightly unnerving and sexually ambivalent Pizza Delivering Paeodophile Uncle of the Jewish Global Conspiracy variety. 

Suddenly, It feels like a very short walk 

from 

everything is underwritten

to 

everything is undermined

How does one sustain a shift of that scale and nature? 

Comedy of course. Great comedy. Crazy comedy. Off-beat comedy. Free-form rough-edged comedy shit. Funny shit. People love to laugh, especially at things that would otherwise make them cry – like the state of their wallet, their world or the nature and idiosyncrasies of the people tasked with running it – elected or otherwise.

Funny is what we do when all else fails. Humour is how we navigate the madness. Funny is sacrosanct; a human right. We don’t like people telling us what to laugh and not laugh at. If you need proof, look no further than the belief that the the inauguration of Donald J Trump was in part powered by people reacting against being told what not to laugh at. Don’t mess with funny. Even it if is offensive or potentially dangerous. 

‘Sy Benson’ discusses comedy and Coffee with ‘Benjy Stone’ [AKA Benjamin Steinberg].

As Sy Benson, head-writer on King Kaiser’s Comedy Cavalcade in the movie My Favourite Year proclaims when challenged to remove his ‘Boss Hijack’ sketch, a bitingly satirical yet potentially libellous piece on a Mobster thug:

“You never cut funny.”   

The relationship been truth, satire, journalism and dangerous living are ancient. Telling powerful people, or massed tribes and types of people exactly what you think of them and their shibboleths has been getting satirists into trouble since Aristophenes in Ancient Greece first thought to poke fun at both Socrates and the Athenian Court System. The golden age of Satire was no different – Moliere, Voltaire and Boileau-Desperaux in France and Swift, Pope, Dryden and Hogarth in the U.K. walked a perilous line with the potential for censure, prison and death threats as the reward for their caustic, parodical exclamations.

This whiff of danger has lurked in the wings of Gonzo since its inception. The counter culture and its harrying of state instruments and bodies in the era of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon and Watergate bought investigative journalists, cultural commentators and bold satirists closer to the flame again. To be seen to be distributing a truth that did not align with the ‘confected’ truth of the governing elites was a very dangerous pastime. 

Furthermore, it wasn’t always political truths that were being smashed or subverted. This was also the era of brutal self enquiry, identity myth busting and raw revelation – where people mined the underlying flows, fractures and flaws of the human psyche through explorations that sought to break down multiple doors of perception in search of some greater cosmic truth via LSD. A search for absolute truths in whichever shape they came could be cause for concern

Again Thomson, this time in a Rolling Stone Article in 1973 states:

“Absolute truth is a rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.” 

If you set out to design, engineer and seed a social movement custom-built to suffocate serious debate and enquiry, undermine universal ethical and moral constructs, and effectively neuter any intellectually-rigorous and profound discourse or enquiry, you couldn’t do better than Gonzo Journalism and National Lampoon’s anything. A stroke of genius. In these two pillars the foundations of a Gonzo Society are born.

To that point, one could posit that Gonzo culture and Gonzo Society both deserve and create Gonzo Politicians. 

Followed to its logical end, one could say that Donald J Trump was the only choice in 2016.

Trump is the ultimate Gonzo Politician. The perfect POTUS to sit in power at the heart of a nation of states suckled on gonzo lampooning and relentless irreverence. In 2016 Hilary was the epitome of a satirical target. Rooted and raised in the self serving circles of political power elites and Washington well-doers, Hilary was never going to have an easy race against Trump in a predominantly Gonzo Society. Gonzo was the pixie dust in Trump’s armoury, the accelerator of his ambition. The 2016 election was far more a realisation of gonzo politics than an assertion of real inalienable political will. 

Is P.J partially responsible for the political mood in 2016? Kinda but not really. No more than for any election since 1969. Should Hunter S Thomson take a bow? Again, it’s a No.

But their legacy does certainly taint the world we now live in, for both good and bad.

If showbiz rules and we’re all Gonzo now, Trump Rules – or at least did for 4 years longer than most of us would have liked. But, careful what you wish for. And perhaps more importantly careful what you laugh it. Because someone might take you seriously.

Inspired by the very real events and conversations [recorded] in an An Evening with PJ O Rourke hosted by Tortoise Media. The topic? America Today.

Hashtags, social scolding & the Fragility of Freedom.

25 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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#metoo, Antiques Roadshow, Barbara Ellen, Byron, Charlie Hebdo, Chimpanzees, Christopher Hitchens, Donald J, Family Guy, Free Speech, Germaine Greer, gogglebox, Jo Cox, Kathy Acker, Language, Naomi Wolff, P Funk, The Oxford Union, Trolls, Trump, twitter

trump-nude-troll-doll-chuck-williams-4.jpg

Who’d listen to an apparently ‘recidivist’, feminist academic and some right-wing lite writer of semi erotic literature?

Me. I happily listen to, read and respect (though not feverishly) the positions of both Germaine Greer and Jilly Cooper for exactly the same reason that I read Barbara Ellen, Naomi Woolf and Kathy Acker.

Do I always like what they say? No. Do I find some of it a bit one dimensional? Yup. Do I sometimes react like an overly defensive bloke? I’m certain I do. But do I find a lot of what they say illuminating, transformative and inspirational. All day long. Do their perspectives improve me? Without question.

I read and engage with them for exactly the same reason I like P. Funk, Christopher Hitchens, Family Guy, the Antiques Roadshow, Gogglebox and Byron: for the human colour and texture delivered by opposing narratives and the frictions held within them. They often fundamentally contradict each other – and throw spanners in each other’s engines and excreta at each other’s windows. That’s good. That’s one of the greatest upsides of enjoying Freedom of Speech.

Where would the joy be if we weren’t free to mock Donald J? That’s satire. That’s a healthy reaction. A massive baby Donald is a perfectly acceptable scale of riposte to a man who holds the attention of the world in his twitter-like hand, and shakes his status like a plastic rattle.

As long as it is done openly, in the light of day, spoken with the courage of one’s convictions, in a peer reviewed, open-sided environment with some basic rules of engagement – that’s all good.

But recently, as the darker corners of the #metoo, clean food and transgender campaigns have demonstrated, it can get ugly our there even when you begin with the best intentions in the world. Boisterous debate, informed discourse and heated discussion can quickly be replaced by something far more insidious and, to me, more dangerous.

I am talking about our provisional transition from open debate and respect for free speech (and the accompanying chimpanzee-like pooh flinging) to a narrow, closed form of cod-intellectual ‘social shout-down’ and the deafening absence of the Right of Reply.

There needs to be a tension, a friction in our evolutions – that’s human – and some subjects need to be approached with a degree of disruptive vigour.

There needs to be some punkish and raw fire blown into some social constructs and mores, mostly because they have become sclerotic. And Free Speech is about giving the fire the oxygen it needs.

But for some, Free Speech is seen as a Trojan horse for self-interest, bullying, dogma, schism, proselytising and propaganda. Well, no shit Sherlock. The openness of Free Speech means that, at some point, some very twisted and odd individuals will abuse the ability and opportunity to state their case.

But Free Speech’s defence mechanism against the twisted idiots and cruelty mongers prevailing lies in its very openness – and an environment rooted in an open Right of Reply on a mass scale. In each person resides the right to say No, I disagree, or ‘that is bad’, or ‘this could be better.’ Free Speech is a human block chain system by which we manage the security and integrity of our social, cultural, ethical and moral codes

It requires us all to be open to a reciprocal respect in the exchange. And it requires us to accept that the outpourings of Free Speech may very well make us feel very aggrieved or uncomfortable, and often so.

That’s its point. It is meant to be the valve in the pressure cooker; the thing that mostly helps to stop large swathes of people feeling they have no voice and reaching boiling point.

Free Speech is a good thing. But it does come with rules of engagement, and with responsibilities and accountabilities that we need to accept.

Free Speech has consequences. And we need to accept these in the brutal cold light of day. Framed in human, living terms, – not just in its philosophical and notional or legal and constitutional terms.

What do I mean by human living terms? Just the random and chaotic emotional truths of how people respond to stuff they are wound up about. Feelings can be uncomfortable. Insights can seem loaded. Emotions can be raw. Thoughts can be dangerous. Beliefs can be murderous. Never more so when they are voiced into the world with seemingly little attention or consideration for how they may be received.

But this is Free Speech is it not?

Freedom of Speech also means that we have the freedom to respond or not to statements and polemics however hateful with greater wit, charm intellect or persuasion than that with which they were served to us.

But sometimes the response is brutal, mindless or violent with little opportunity for debate or discourse.

The French satirists of Charlie Hebdo making cartoons of the Prophet can be viewed as either extraordinarily disrespectful smart arses who misread their right to mock with dreadful consequence or brave defenders of Free Speech. Regardless, most would accept that they knew what the extremity of the response might be. That is where courage or recklessness must step up and accept that the consequence of its actions though inhuman or horrific or criminal are none the less potential consequences. Je suis Charlie.

Free Speech is, in itself, open and equal – but that comes at a price.

Firstly, that we have to also listen to preachers and proselytisers of all kinds of shite wanging on endlessly with their propaganda or their misshapen and offensive views. And secondly we must accept that Free Speech is there to defend our right to have a voice, not to protect us against violent, harmful of hateful riposte. That is the role of the laws and systems of our democratic constitutions to uphold that side of the Suffrage bargain – that I am free to state my views and beliefs openly without fear of violent or harmful response. But in real, raw human everyday terms, might a psychotic or a fundamentalist or worse still a foreign government actor ‘get’ to me before the police man or woman (or howsoever they might identify) placed there to protect my Human Right to Free Speech. Yup. Jo Cox paid the greatest price for the freedom to voice our beliefs and politics in an all too human realm of ignorant response.

Silencing voices we do not like the sound and metre of is not democratic. Suppressing opposition is not how an open society operates. But we do it anyway. And sometimes the most successful way to hide something slightly dodgy is in plain sight, in this instance dressed up as a digital pillar of freedom of expression.

Here we return to the issue of No Voice or No Right to Reply and the socio-cultural twitter smack-down of Free Speech

The Oxford Union’s persistent need to silence hate mongers, sexists and racists disguised as authors, politicians, artists, academics or celebrity speakers, citing them as evil, is, I believe, a childish response from what is supposed to be a bastion of enlightenment, intelligence and wannabe stalwarts of the freedom to practice and speak freely.

I expect them to be at the forefront of this issue. Not on the back-foot.

That the Oxford Union cannot a) manage just 1 hour of ‘discomfort’ (the discomforting effect of listening to some twisted manipulator of reason and belief) in a seat in one of the most socially comfortable and privileged environments in the world and b) find the wherewithal to illuminate the insanity and misguided-ness of those people beggars belief.

If the intellectual bastions of a democratic society are too fragile or easily damaged by the turgid minds of the extremist, then we have a problem.

If you believe someone is citing or excusing violence, suppression or prejudice against the person either emotionally, physically, philosophically, spiritually or politically; make your case. Take the podium and illuminate the insanity of their bullshit through reasoned and sometimes unreasonable discourse.

But perhaps therein lies the point. Charlie Hebddo has demonstrated that you have to do this in the full knowledge that the boisterous but ultimately harmless debating society approach to conflict and problem resolution is a luxury that few people have and even fewer respect.

The world does not always respond in the measured, monochromatic mid-tones of a Mid-Western Psychologist.

Maybe that’s the issue for our delicate intelligentia?

You need to be prepared for what humans throw at you. And its messy.

We resort to chimp like shit flinging at the drop of a hat. And if we can beat our chests and rally a crowd of the intellectually lazy, spiritually misguided or emotionally stunted to our cause, chances are, we will, regardless of the veracity of our arguments or the quality of their support.

When we close down or silence those voices (instead of hearing them out and then deconstructing them at scale) we create a vacuum; an absence of natural tension. And history has shown that the smallest, pettiest, most vicious personal human agendas can rise up freely inside a vacuum.

If we don’t like the language or the statements of the likes of Donald J Trump or Germaine Greer, we need to use our own to rebuff them. Not just close them down.

But if we do that in the belief that everyone will play fair, we are ignoring the bestial creature truth of humanity.

Hopefully we are learning to understand that free speech, shaped as it is by the human psyche, is often going to be incendiary, disgraceful, unpleasant or, mostly, disagreeable, (unless I happen to be the person freeing my speech of course).

Free Speech has consequences, for the listener, and for the speaker. In the basest human terms those consequences can be hostile, violent, diminishing, degrading and sometimes criminal. This is the cause and effect of being human. Our beliefs whether communicated through speech, action or gesture will be both proselytised in a raw human manner and received in the same. Often an extreme response cannot be claimed to be truly surprising. Shocking perhaps. But not surprising.

For example:

If I am a man (or, more likely in this example, a sexually retarded fantasist game designer ‘child’ of a man running the upgrade on Grand Theft Auto), who has spouted the twisted belief that every rape ‘wants it’, and, subsequently, I get violently anally pegged by a troubled-turned-violent rape victim in some act of vengeance against my publically spouted beliefs, so be it.

Now that may sound a little extreme but is it wholly unexpected? How could it be? We know that trauma scars people physically and emotionally. A victim of extreme physical abuse can sometimes be driven to consider undertaking vengeful actions. Fact. This is not some movie fantasy of revenge. It would be naive to pretend it was.

So, if I voice an opinion, even as an ignorant provocation, I know what I am saying and my intention in saying it. Does that deserve a criminal or life disfiguring act against me? Or even a murderous one? Possibly not. And there are laws to dissuade someone from thinking otherwise.

BUT it IS a possibility I must consider when I open my mouth and speak, especially on incendiary topics. Because I live in a raw and human world, democratic or otherwise.

We are creatures with a genetic lineage that was shaped across hundreds of thousands of generations before we even thought to set up one camp together, let alone a civilised society. The complexity of what runs beneath the surface of us – what systems we’re running behind the interface of our conscious self – is only just beginning to be revealed by science and psychology.

We are ancient creatures with a modern veneer of civility.  We are, in phone terms, a Nokia 100 with a state of the art Android interface. And Freedom of Speech and people’s responses to it are the raw proof of that.

The language we use when we spout anything – from the sublime and enlightening to the ridiculous and disagreeable – is a powerful technology that we’ve been honing for a while. It has impact and reach. Wrap an opinion or a belief in it and we in effect light blue touch paper. It can be devastating. In some instances Sticks and stones would be the kinder option.

The learned experiences, beliefs and strategies that we use language to communicate are not always positive or palatable ones and they are not always done with a view to the common good (unless in some weird moment you think that the common good might be served by all-white sections of the UK, a transgender ban, and men-only golf clubs!). It goes with the territory.

Human language is a sharp tool that can both help and harm. And like all sharp tools, we need to tread cautiously in how when and where we use it; and to whom. And take responsibility for what happens when we do.

Regardless of the nature or capability of your exercising your right to use language freely to make your point, the main thing again is that it is undertaken with openness and the Right to Reply.

Tyrannical smack downs of someone who says something we don’t like are an unsurprising emotional reaction. Humans don’t like being wrong but, more importantly, are truly dreadful when they are feeling ‘really’ right.

This is less about the mitigation of the wrongness that sometimes occurs in environments of free speech, and more about the application of Righteousness in those events.

Righteousness is a wonderful word for a dreadful human nature. It brings together the spirit of divine complicity (support from on high) in your cause or belief, with a big slather of super conservative institutional rigour and supposed socio-cultural substance (regardless of whether ‘the party’ is of a left wing or right wing disposition).

And righteousnessis the only thing I could call the cultural shift that now has us banning dickheads from publically spouting their dickheadedness in environments like the Oxford Union where they can at least be dis-assembled publically – and the twisted logic that led a large number of smart intelligent people to not only take Margaret Atwood to task on her watch outs for #metoo but to damn her outright with no Right of Reply. Smackdown!

If the ‘Snowflake generation,’ as Millennials are so called, are at the forefront of these shifts, then we simply need to be conscious of that old cause and effect paradigm and be aware that the effect may be equally distasteful .

The Snowflake generation are called as much because they are seen by some as insufferably fragile – children in the world, bred to be easily damaged, hurt or offended by even the slightest harshness in tone, content, belief, polemic or politic. In this world view, everything becomes viewed through the filter of a threat to be shut or shot down.

The proof given is that when people cite something that doesn’t suit their world view, it’s damned or dismissed as recidivist or self-serving. (That it might just be a well founded and timeless piece of wisdom, or intelligently arrived at point of view worthy of consideration seems to be irrelevant.)

And therein lies the cliché. The Smackdown is simply another tyranny to replace other tyrannies. I had hoped we were less obvious but we’re not. The seemingly weak being in fact aggressors in the exercise and application of their fears in the world is a reoccurring human truth.

Tyrants do not like Free Speech. Especially the real kind. Hence the Fake News campaign of one Donald J.  Am I comparing #metoo and Donald J’s Fake News? Yes – but only in the fact that they both have used social networks, especially that of the unsophisticated, stunted responses of twitter (AKA Troll heaven) to silence and shame their detractors.

I am not for one moment venturing that their politics or ethics are similar. Just their tools and the spirit in which they apply them.

They have both adopted the same mechanism – of scolding and damnation – by which to quash what they don’t want to hear.

So my hope is that Free Speech, the real version will a) be recognised for the powerful and democratic tool it is b) respected as something that has consequences for both the speaker and the listener. Both good and bad.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trump, Trust, People Power & A New Social Contract

25 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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20 Million Voices, Con, Divestment, facebook, Fossil Fuels, hawks, Islam, Lyndon Johnsen, Military Industrial Complex, Monty Python & The Holy Grail, NeoCon, Oil Men, PeoplePower, Pussy Grabber, Radicalism, Social Contract, Trump, TRUST, UltraCon, Vietnam

images.jpeg

I’m less concerned with the overt Trumpness of Donald. I am sure that I should be.

Weirdly, the idea that one certain mister ‘pussy grabber’ becomes the President Elect of the United States does not surprise or shock me.

The White House has had its fair share of mysoginists and philanderers – and of course the hawks (both the useful ones the world desperately needed and the assholes the world didn’t). Presidents have not all been shades of the wholesome, family-loving God bless America of Carter and Reagan.

Trump’s direct assaults on minorities, global warming groups, foreign aid, etc. are in no way a surprise. He claims that he is against radical Islam not Muslims, but seems to think beating up Muslims is a great strategy to that end.

And as for the Wall and the Mexican issue. Its teetering on high comedy.

I imagine Trump in the roll of the Norman Knight played by John Cleese in Monty Python & The Holy Grail, looking down from his high vantage on the castle wall.

As the people far below call up to him the Donald flicks his nose at them.

Whispers from off camera: What do they want?

Donald: They’re looking for the American Dream… (sniggers) I told them we already got one.

The cynics point to the fact that Trump can’t be a friend of Hollywood because Hollywood would never forgive him for sending back the people who do their gardens – as every lawn from Sunset to Malibu would scorch and die if it weren’t for the Mexican part time labourers who fill the pick-ups every morning on every principal corner of Sunset where the bus stops sit.

Global warming is cobblers of course  in Donaldland (my new name for the Disney-esque NeoCon Hoo Haa place we call the Disunited States of America).

We knew this was coming. His dinner party friends have all made a huge amounts of money from fossil fuels – Oh, and they think the science is cod. How remarkably convenient. Oh and they’d like to continue to make a whole lot of money from fossil fuels. (Apparently the quickest was to roll back environmental impact stuff and fluff is to roll forward one hell of a pipeline.)

And the new hawkish ‘build it up build it out’ approach will be making a whole lot of industrialists in the ordnance sector positively dribble in anticipation. Its like ’64 and Lyndon Johnson’s election all over again.

So shock horror probe.

Donald’s anti the soft lefty red types in the arts. He’s backing the Oil Men, the Military Industrial Complex, the dream of the self-made Millionaire, a two people America and defensive divisive Isolationism.

Damn right.

This is what made America great people. And that’s what Donald is gonna do again.

Look it. Whatta guy. Even his Campaign Officer is a helluva woman – comin’ out fig’tin an e’ry thing at that Inauguration Dinner. Hah.

We’re a hellzaapoppin, asskickin, red slappin’, say it the way it is, speak my mind raise my fists burn some rubber bomb some ragheads give no quarter US of Damn A – an’ don’t you forget it.

There is nothing surprising about Donald Trump at all. He is a very ordinary unsurprising old school alpha man. He is that man in that bar or pub. Foghorn Leghorn. His scrabble for money has given him bragging rights and a loudspeaker for whats right and wrong. And his politics are simply his genetic ‘assert & ascend’ survival strategy writ large and loud.

The greatest issue with Donald Trump is not his politics. It’s his integrity. That fuzzy golden grey periphery that seems to wrap itself around and about everything he touches.

And the minority of ordinary people who voted for him are potentially in for a rude awakening one day. There’s no guarantee he’ll screw it up of course. He may busk it. Survive the next 4 years and fate will smile on him.

It’s a little like functioning alcoholics: teetering on the edge of the abyss of their addiction but never quite falling into it. He may just glide across the bumps. Even more scary for some, there may even be some things that he does that are not necessarily welcome but actually might benefit a large number of people. The issue is can you trust him to do that but not at a punitive cost to others. Favouring one group or bloc or constituency over another is a politician’s remit. But not a President’s.

A substantially larger number of the thinking, living, earning, voting population of the country he runs don’t trust him to run the country in a manner they see fitting for an advanced and great First World bastion of Democracy and Liberalism (and I don’t just mean the fiscal kind).

They do have some fair reason.

A man who does not immediately and absolutely divest his business interests in the interest of running a country is like a man who turns an old pre wedding girlfriend into a post wedding mistress. A weighty dose of cake and Eating it.

A president who does not happily take a transparent line on his business and tax affairs is not to be trusted. This is where I will draw the Silvio Berlusconi parallel. It simply does not work. It leads to or exacerbates existing corruption, self interest runs riot, and toxic back room dealings and trades become the foundation of government decision making. Governments and Presidents do not need any more ‘obfuscation as policy’ – other than  that which already exists in the misty foggy worlds of GeoPolitics.

Regardless of whether he is playing games to reduce tax disproportionately or whether it is because Divestment might lead to full and open scrutiny of the financial health and integrity of those businesses – especially the degree of leverage he’s using and the source of that leverage (China anyone?), he is a man who fogs facts and doesn’t finish sentences – an obfuscator of the first order.

Policies are not the issue. Trust is, in regards to both his intentions and his actions.

And to be clear what I mean by ‘half the nation do not Trust Donald’ – I do not mean Trust as in their belief in his ability to undertake and do something he commits to doing. I wholly trust him to keep to his (vague) word and commitments:

“I trust DT to execute a mass of executive orders in his own and associates interest and to his own ends”

I wholly believe he will do that.

The Trust I mean is the one that defines the commitment to an action that is instilled with values and ethics – and of a clear sense of collective and not just selective good:

“I trust DT to set aside this own self-interest in pursuit of creating a better country for both the people who didn’t vote for him as for those who did.

As President, his role is to increase prosperity, and reduce division between the haves and the not haves, and between those for and against him.

Which leads me to venture a thought.

I wonder whether perhaps in our peer to peer world in the absence of a Trust coming down from on high, the new social contract needs to be drawn not between government and the people, but BETWEEN THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES.

Perhaps the new social contract – the contract of TRUST – needs to be drawn up between Trump voters and non Trump Voters. And to each the other is held accountable. Because if Donald is all about acting on the will of the people, then the people’s integrity and mutual trust and vision is everything and he should be in service to that.

Perhaps this is the new model to be forged – enshrined and acted upon in the interests of the American people.

The social contract of TRUST should become a respectful charter for mutuality that transcends party and individual politics:

I trust you to uphold your personal liberties without holding them above mine.

I trust you to raise and protect your family but not at the expense of mine or others

I trust you not to harm our communities in pursuit of making a better one of your own

I trust you to raise your hand in support of those less well off than you, not in suppression of them.

I trust you to protect the freedom of every American citizen, not just those like you.

I trust you to protect our great American wildlife and countryside for our grandchildren

I trust you not to be seduced by words but swayed by actions

I trust you to share equally the Greatness we collectively make.

Just a thought. A new peer to peer Social Contract for the American People.

If we could get both sides to agree that it is the people who Donald serves, and let the people shape the Social Contract that he is action, underwrite and secure using all of the instruments tools and machinery of his elected office, now that would be something.

Who knows: we might even have finally found a meaningful role for Facebook in a declining market.

A peer to peer social contract managed across face book’s 20 Million users – which to be fair even allowing for the teenage user profile and pre voting age bloc is still a hell of a lot closer to representing the future voice and desire of America.

It is certainly more broadly representative of the people of America than the 60% turnout of which Donald still did not secure the majority.

Just saying.

 

 

Speaking loudly in a Public Place & The art of conversing sustainably.

28 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

80s Casuals, BREXIT, cars, Class War, Education, fashion & Beauty, Fotball, gene Pool, Genetics, Golf, Harry Enfield, Hilditch & Key, Holidays, Identity, Living The Dream, Llandeilo, Macclesfield, MAMILs, mobile, Notting Hill, Petworth, Prince Regent, Rugby, Semi Detached, Sex, Skiing, Sustainability, Tacchini, Tech, Trainspotting, Trump, Withal & I

19af089861d58143e7bcffbf177b0f51.jpg.png

Love us. We just can’t help ourselves.

For all the homespun wisdoms and studies around how being more socially aware of, sensitive to and inclusive of those around us creates a more resilient society, we just can’t help banging on, sounding off, shouting out, and blahing about  – loudly, relentlessly and shamelessly – about us, us, us.

There’s a touch of Blackadder’s Prince Regent’s about us.

In Blackadder the Third, Sense and Sensibility, Rowan Atkinson’s eponymous butler is trying to coach Hugh Laurie’s roaring roistering and very shouty Prince Regent in the art of public speaking, unhelpfully aided by two ‘actors’.

‘Unaccustomed as I am to speaking loudly in public place…’.

Yup. That’s us.

We’re simply oblivious to the cascade of fog horning we actually do. Or simply don’t care.

Perhaps it’s all part of our genetic makeup. Not happy with our messenger genes working furiously, invisibly, silently on our behalf, perhaps we need to openly trumpet our superiorities and assert ourselves on something, anything, to demonstrate our fitness for gene pool ascension. A sort of oral chest beating. A belt and braces approach to social assertion.

We’ve certainly got plenty of topics to choose from with which to do it:

  • Holidays (boutique off beat long haul 6 star glamp “please find me interesting” and package all-inclusive entertainment included “… but it’s great for the kids…” meets the urbane city break couple with an ironic burlesque trapeze in their suite)
  • Homes ( and the whole region meets post code fascism thing that goes with them  -you know who you are London)
  • Fashion & Beauty (naked stripped back Paraben and orang-utan free meets hi bake crusted fake slathered super gloss with a centre ground of super-drugged over doses of buy 3 get none free )
  • Cars (muscle car versus hot hatch versus electric versus petrol head versus bike versus Classic versus Zip)
  • Sex (socially this is open season – from “euughhh no thanks!” princesses and the blank-eyed cote d’Azur lizard lover to semi-detached Tudored, Tweezered and GoPro-ed all-in wrestling and Breezer bus-stop procreation)
  • Education – (Toffs going state-side leaving the Publics to the oligarchs and bankers , the rise of the Old grammar, and the Churchy state scrum versus post code lottery shitsville Secondary in an over-pressured catchment area kind of thing)
  • Sport (especially things like Golf and Formula 1 – but Rugby versus Football is good for a class fight – but then so is Union versus League – yikes – and cycling’s for MAMILs)
  • Technology (is that the latest super triple upgrade diamond encrusted razor thin i-phone meets digital poverty and second hand devices with digital dementia)
  • Drugs (council estate pill heads, skunks and suburban speed freaks rub up against school study stoners and coke horse fashionistas – with a sprinkle of Withnail and Trainspotting for good measure)

There is endless fun to be had for anyone with a Class calibrated slide rule and an eye for an accent, a shabby cuff, an overturned trainer instep in whitest white and a social smoke machine.

All of the above and many more subjects besides can offer multiple signposts to our ability to secure, protect and expand the gene pool – as a mate and provider –  and more importantly, where we think we currently are and hopefully wish to land on the great ladder of Life.

But many of these subjects are impenetrable to most of us in the flow of our accelerated lives – and carry a complex and subtle range of degrees not immediately obvious.

Impact demands some quite bloody and explicit sign posting and you’ve got to pick the right ones if you’re going for the ‘speaking loudly…’ option.

If chosen properly, to suit both the environment and the audience, the best ones can be a source of endless amusement for the seasoned observer are the ones where our social anxieties, bombast and terrors come rolling boldly into view unmasked and unfettered.

Now before we go on and just to clarify, on the technology front, there is of course a whole sub section beyond the basic noisy snobberies and tribalism of who’s got what “look at my device” technology, rooted in a whole new behaviour – that of a Life lived like an open wound on mobile loudspeaker.

Who has not had the unmitigated pleasure of listening to someone blah on in full voice about riveting subjects such as the process of returning the cardigan they bought on sale for £7.39 …but I had to return it  but then I find out that the sticker bar code had rubbed off so I had to go to the second counter, yeah the one across the other side in charge of bar codes, who’s that?…in the background?….ahhhhhh….how is he….anyway, and you wouldn’t believe it they only sent me back to the first one…ooh…he’s always dropping things that boy….and anyway that snooty cow was there you know the one and anyway…bip bip….oh sorry thought the bus was being re routed so anyway they put a bar code on it and scanned and then the machine woudn’t w…

SHUT UP!!!!!!

Why anyone thinks that listening to the utter banality and mundanity of them honking on about everything from Cheese and Onion crisps to their bunions holds the slightest bit of interest for anyone else within 20 yards of them beggars belief. Do they care. No. On and on they go. At top volume.

Perhaps fog-horning into our mobile while staring listlessly or sometimes cluelessly out of train or bus window makes us feel more alive, or alternately, less dead, or inert.

Or perhaps we all blah on because we’re afraid of the silence. Silence is very scary. Especially in the glittering noise of our conspicuous consumption world. The Silence gets filled up with stuff like thinking about over-drafts, and unpaid bills, and the car we can’t afford: the person we aren’t. And the fact that your other half seemed to pay far too much attention to old slippery bollocks with the ‘hot hatch’ at the pub AGAIN. Oh no. Fill that silence RIGHT NOW.

Or maybe it’s just a sign that we are lonely creatures relentlessly reaching out with any excuse to just talk to someone about something anything. Nail clippers. The benefits of GREGG’s foot long sausage roll (which to be fair does demand quite a lot of conversation).

Who knows. Anyway. Ear plugs in. Crack on.

So where was I? Oh yes. The deafening hawk, crackle and scrape of social laddering grinding across the room at full volume is a wonder to behold, especially in England, that bastion of crippling class consciousness and the emollient cold eyed Cheshire cat smile of its courtly Norman culture.

Now whether these conversations happen in a semi in a cul-de-sac in Macclesfield,  a terrace in Llandeilo or a townhouse in Petworth, the broad trajectory and oath is the same.

I – the fog horn – being of sound mind and body – shall peak loudly in such terms as to clearly communicate to those gathered within ear shot what level of lifestyle I have, the laissez faire with which I take or leave ‘work’, the shade quality or quantity  of leisure time I have and how I spend it – and ultimately – really really – whether I am, to quote the great Philosopher, Harry Enfield, “considerably richer than yaow”.

 (NOTE: This dynamic becomes doubly interesting with couples who might in the secrecy of a closed conversation or room be accused of marrying ‘below’ or ‘above their station’: as this creates an explicit external dynamic – between the individuals and those outside around them – and the implicit internal one between two people in intimate contact and with an intimate knowledge of each other’s foibles and failings in the class department)

So, for example: hands up who’s sat in a restaurant or bar listening to the rallied ranks cawing about a skiing holiday they have just been on or upon which they are about to embark?

Amazing. It is such a perfect storm of social drama. Which resort? Which slope? Drive or Fly? What grade? Mogul? Age of Youngest on Skis? (since he was 3 months old…Obvs). dangerous off-piste-er? French skier? Snowboarder?

And up diddly up up it keeps going. Heli Skiing. Cloud skiing. Rain Skiing. Skiing across a killer whale’s back juggling a bottle of fizz and a Grey Goose chaser.

“Ohh Jasp, you ARE a just SO fucking OUT THERE”.

The ratcheting upwards of who’s the biggest cock in the skiing conversation is a great example of a topic hijacked by our social and genetic need to assert ourselves and is a miracle to behold.

And when I use the word ‘cock’ please do not think I am removing the female gender in this. Social climbing and social fog-horning reaches its apogee in the open mouths of some of the women in these conversations in much the same way with the men.

Don’t get me wrong: I really enjoy skiing. I am not terribly good at it. But I have fun. Moving from bar to bar at high speed across snow is a right laugh. But life’s too short to spend more than 15 minutes talking loudly about it. Isn’t it? And let’s be clear. I am not referring in this piece to people who actually really do LOVE skiing. The die-hards any-weather, can’t live without it addicts. I could listen to their stories all day long.

No. I am talking about the people who haul themselves and their families up a collection of slopes every year, more out of social terror for what not doing it might mean to their school run dinner party schtick than the actual pleasure of doing it.

Golf has a similar schtick. Come on. We’ve all witnessed it. The arcane yet very loud golf-speak followed shortly after by ‘the swing’ with invisible iron finished off with a tongue on roof of mouth ball ‘TSCHH” sound  effect. Marvellous. And what’s interesting in the social malaise is that someone using Golf to publicly assert themselves socially may not even realise that someone else might be judging them silently for the fact they actually pronounced the word GOWLF instead of saying GOFF.

(Careful out there. The issue with social ladders is once on them, there tends to be people both above as well as below you. And the same rules apply. ‘Betters’ are like Bosses – everyone has one – somewhere – somehow – even if they are not immediately visible. They are there.)

Christmas is also a mine field of social fog-horning as it allows the social fog-horner to draw string together a whole host of levers and pulleys.

Consumption and exotic gift purchasing. Rare party invitations. Travel – preferably long haul. Higher order experiences. Exceptional distance from ‘here’ (everyday life)

Witness in a Notting Hill coffee shop three women, all American, just at the ordering point, a casual collision while all on their different morning threads – to work, to yoga instructor, to next coffee shop – living the dream, replayed in coffee shops up and down the country at every rung up and down the social ladder.  (You do not need to have a banker for a husband or as a job to pretend that you can live like someone who does. What are credit cards for!)

So the first asks the second:

“So hey, when are you heading out?”

“Oh gawd, we HAVE to go to New York first, some dull party but then up to the Cape, and then straight to Vale as soon as his mother lets us escape. How about you?”

“Yeah pretty much the same. He’s on his got to get away tip at the moment. Dunno. Might go to St. Barts over New year but that’s about it.”

The deafening silence of the third woman is palpable. Both turn to her and one speaks.

“Hey what about you guys?”

VERY LONG PAUSE.

“Well, think we’re going to have to stay put this year what with John’s work …”

BIGGER PAUSE – SILENCE – and she turns to the server.

“…can I get a Grande decaf cappuccino please…”

SHUT DOWN – SMALL COMPRESSED SMILE – OUCH.

The pause and silence is deafening. All the signs are big: really, really BIG – and not in a good way.

The two ladies look at her, shuffle a little, small smiles to each other.

This is uncomfortable. Not this is AWKWARD.

Three large klaxons have sounded above the lady’s head accompanied by flashing neon.

STATUS ALERT – might not be able to keep up/social death/slightly embarrassing

MONEY ALERT – might not be able to afford shiny life this month or year – do we invite her?

JOB ALERT – husband shaky job position or worse – NO ONE stays in London over Holidays.

Hopefully her remarkably over-priced hot, wet frappecrappachaiccinolate will take the edge off the moment. Nothing says Everything is Awesome quite like an over-priced coffee.

That much cow product in one over glazed cup would put most people into a cow coma of dairy proportion – something that I think she may well appreciate at this very moment.

Sometimes things scream louder in public than any raised voice – or should I say sometimes the world of logos and marques SCREAM louder in public that any raised voice but to much the same effect.  And of course there is the collision of semiotics and invisible gesturing that needs to be folded into this.  Social sign posts come in all manner of variants

In one conversation with a very sartorially obsessed man, I noticed the usual scoffing at a large bloke in a Tacchini sweatshirt – 80s Footie Casual FLASHBACK.

The gentleman pointed out that it was a larger than life example of crass status making –vulgar logo bright colours – gaudy etc.

When I mentioned that he and the Tacchini man were no different he looked aghast. The higher order pomposity of him was firmly pricked.

My point to him was this. I ‘knew’ that the shirt he was wearing was from Hilditch & Key. I had one in a similar fabric, French cuff, cut away collar. His shirt SCREAMED Jermyn Street – in much the same way that Sergio Tacchini man’s screamed Wembley Market.

This stuff matters – to everyone. No-one is immune. This stuff – this pointless scrabbling for identity and the scatterings of ‘things’ that prop it up – it’s part of who and what we all are – whether the ascetics of the Sustainability world like it or not.

(To be fair our ability to wield the Luxury Of Conscience as a day job is a massive assertion of status, identity and educational favour in itself – one that few on this planet, even those in the emerged western cultures, can dream of let alone afford to pursue.)

We need to be really careful when we incite people to stop consuming shiny things they can’t afford and that damage the planet.

So, when someone tells me they’ve developed a new sustainability methodology, garnered some new insights or developed a campaign that involves the words or sentiments ‘stop, reduce diminish, lessen’ and all of the other reductive words we use in sustainability communications, I think of all of these people speaking loudly in public places – sometimes shamelessly, sometimes unconsciously but always slightly desperately asserting their social ascension or at its very least their social survival on the ladders of the ‘look at me’ gene pool.

If we stopped trying to mitigate and compress their competitive genetically fuelled need to assert themselves in the world – and equally stopped trying to erase their ‘terrible’ world view (good luck with that)  perhaps we might be quicker to find a language of human resilience in which we can all share and take part – and somehow get more than the usual 7-13% depending on your think tank or academic referencing to give half a crap about how we live and what we consume.

NOTE This piece was sparked by my reading yet another recent and of course exhaustive Sustainable Lifestyles White Paper Report while sitting in a pub in East Sussex populated by a rather noisy cross section of society.

They were all outwards and upwards – celebrating their very survival in the game called life. They were all at the end of their week, sweeping grumps and whines away with pints and wine and thoughts of pies, curry, pizza, pork scratchings, or clubbing and gear followed by lie ins, golf, swimming, mountain biking, shopping, shooting (birds not films), movies, football, rugby and then what form of Sunday they might have before the shitty bitty day job and weekly worries heaved back into view.

I can safely say that not one of them was at any juncture discussing climate change, acidification of the oceans, human suffrage or equality and diversity – and until we find a way or theme or thread that brings these conversations into the pub meaningfully and without sounding like the Vibe Killer has just turned up  – we’ll stay on the margins wondering how ‘terrible’ things like BREXIT TRUMP and the rest of the sorry shower of deniers and their master plans manage to get the thumbs up in this world  

Silvio Berlusconi to be Italy’s Ambassador to the U.S.A A HELLO MAGAZINE WORLD EXCLUSIVE

24 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

berlusconi, Bunga Bunga, farage, Refugees, Republic of Italy, The Future is bright, Therapy, Trump, US President

Unknown.jpeg

Silvia E’Salvia, Hello Magazine’s woman ‘on the inside’ of the sacred ring that is Italian Politics has excitedly revealed that Silvio Berlusconi, ex-prime minister of the Republic of Italy, has been notified by the office in waiting for the White House and President Elect, Donald Trump, that he is to be invited to Capitol Hill to begin formal negotiations for the acceptance of the post of Italian Ambassador to the United States of America.

It seems that President Elect Donald Trump has exercised an obscure amendment which allows him to circumnavigate International Law, Diplomatic etiquette and most importantly the Italian Parliament and President to invite Mr Berlusconi directly to the Post – a right recently also xercised in his wish to draw the sage and deep counsel of one Nigella Farage, from the  United Kingdom, to the White House front lawn .

We are told that the news was communicated to a stunned and rather emotional Berlusconi whilst he was undergoing an intense form of Moldovan Rhythm Therapy  for a ‘thrown hip‘ condition.

Berlusconi, renowned for his relentless support for Improving Lives For Refugee Minors  immediately rose to the occasion and the opportunity.

The world famous philanthropist, champion of Women’s Rights and a fair economy for all: the Lupo Di Popolo, white knight for the working people’s right to justice, spiritual shamen of Bunga Bunga, and a fierce advocate for the removal of graft and corruption in all corners of Italian daily life sees the similarities between his own beliefs and morals and those of Mr Trump as a great advantage in creating a superior relationship between Italy & The USA

“It is a great honour to serve my country in ‘cementing’ the relationship between Italy and The United States Of America – and in reaching out directly into the inner court of a man who positively ‘glows’ wth integrity”.

“Donald speaks for the people, sometimes even when they don’t want him to. He says things they feel ashamed to say. Or even think. BUT. Nonetheless. The burden of Power is great yet he wears it like a Valentino neck scarf. I salute the shining azure blue of his politic. He is a giant – a man of small feet yet great intellect.”

Once he had replaced the towel and dismissed the therapist, Ex Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi went on to tell the insider:

“I am also here to support and defend Mr Trump’s decision to run his business empire from the inside of the White House, using only his closest advisors and family to ensure 100% commitment to the cause. We in Italy know the power of ‘family’ and how one must always keep ‘the family’ close to you when taking and distributing power.”  

In her last SMS to us before Silvia Di Salvia was whisked away by a highly attentive Mr Berlusconi to a small palazzo outside Rome for a intense man a mano, to wrestle with the thorny political issues of 18th Venetian Lingerie and Tiramisu, she imparted the closing words of the soon to be Ambassador Silvio Berlusconi:

“One must remember, Opportunity is like a mistress – best treated nicely, well housed, holidayed often and regularly attended to.”

The profundity is overwhelming. As is the cologne.The future looks bright for us all.

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