Kraftwek
This t-shirt was made for me by my sister. She runs a business which embroiders and prints designs onto items of clothing. The design itself is a picture of a cat, drawn by me. There was an imperfection on part of the printing machine when it was being made which has left a thin line close to the cat’s nose, making it look like the cat has a bad cold as well as a problem with personal hygiene, but I don’t really mind. I draw a lot of things, mostly cats. A few years ago I started a blog to put pictures of some of the things I’d drawn online. I also added some of the thing I’d written. A few months later I set up a Twitter account which I planned to use to promote this blog. However, Twitter is addictive. It offers an immediate audience and, in its brevity, is the perfect medium for short pieces of writing, especially jokes; and in its ephemeralness (not a word, but you know what I mean), its transience, suits jokes about current events. I still draw and still use Twitter to pedal my wares, but I quickly fell into the Twitter trap of telling jokes. Telling them for free, to anyone who’d listen, with no obvious goal in sight beyond the infrequent approval of an increasing number of increasingly disapproving strangers.
The following is a brief story about one of these jokes.
A year and a bit ago there were, you may remember, three pre-election leaders’ debate screened live on Sky News, the BBC and ITV respectively. During the opening minutes of the first debate I took to Twitter, wrote ‘This is the worst Kraftwek gig ever #leadersdebate’ (note, as posterity has done, the misspelling of ‘Kraftwerk’), and then clicked ‘tweet’ (Twitter’s version of ‘post’ or ‘send’).
And look. They do look a bit like Kraftwerk (as they will persist in spelling it). I thought this was quite a funny observation. Nothing too special, but worth sharing with my small pool of followers, then numbering around a modest yet thoroughly respectable 700.
Very quickly, it became evident that this observation had hit a nerve. The people of Twitter, it seemed, agreed wholeheartedly that the party leaders did indeed look like Kraftwerk. Their agreement was total and ubiquitous. My replies-feed was instantly choked with retweets (for those happy few uninitiated in the ways of Twitter, replies are any tweets including my username and a ‘retweet’ is when someone else on Twitter re-posts your tweet, crediting you as its original author), then with retweets of those retweets, then retweets of those, and so on. There was a draught coming from the on-screen counter showing the amount of people following as the number climbed higher and higher like a stolen car’s milometer. In all honesty, it was a little daunting.
Straight away, folks started copy and pasting this joke and passing it off as their own. This happens. It shouldn’t, but it does, and it irked me. It was my observation, after all, my phraseology, my joke. I’d seen folks gripe about joke-theft, but this was the first time I’d actually seen it happen on Twitter. I upbraided a few people here and there who I saw posting the joke without crediting me, whilst simultaneously trying to entertain my new-found followers with further, increasingly less-incisive comments about the onscreen debate. Hard work, and ultimately fairly pointless: soon there were way more people copy and pasting the tweet and passing it off as their own than I could humanly deal with. And, again, people were retweeting them, and then they themselves were getting retweeted, and so on. It was like trying to use a toothbrush to staunch a shotgun wound. A massive, leaky, satirical wound.
I stopped telling people off. Retweets are (rather depressingly) a measure of how successful a joke you’ve made has been, the online equivalent of rapturous applause or, as tends to be my experience, one or two people clicking their fingers like appreciative beatniks at an awkward poetry reading. Kraftwek had gained me more retweets than I’m ever liable to have again: somewhere in the 1000′s. I’m aware that, for those who don’t use Twitter, I might as well be bragging about how I slayed an army of goblins a World Of Warcraft, but just take my word for it, 1000′s is lots. I left things as they were and spent a week doing my normal Twitter schtick – jokes no-one gets, observations no-one cares for. Some new followers came, some (quite a few) of the Kraftwek ones drifted away. Within a week, of course, came the second leaders’ debate. I’m not a huge fan of repeating myself when it comes to any writing (even Twitter) but, given my ownership of this seemingly popular Kraftwek joke was at stake, decided to allow it. I stuck the joke on Twitter again, in the form of a link to the original tweet, self-mockingly imploring people to ‘keep it real’ and remember who their online folk-hero troubadour was. I’m your Daniel Kitson, I told them. Your Bill Hicks. Again, futile. There were even more people ‘Kraftwekking’ this time; they were everywhere, pissing my joke all over the place like comedy diabetics, many before the debate had even begun. One particular gentleman, whose timeline hitherto consisted largely grammatically poor insults directed at well-known homosexuals, tweeted my joke at Charlie Brooker, who duly retweeted it to his mighty army of followers. I got quite annoyed at him (the tweeter, not Brooker) and made an attempt at publicly taking him to task. I was polite and reasonable but no, I accept, it wasn’t the most dignified approach. But dammit that guy was getting kudos for my joke. The sham-LOLs he was suddenly showered with were mine. The ROFL’s h ewas gorging himself on were hollow and meaningless because they belonged to me. This is what Twitter does to a person. Another otherwise well-adjusted and easy-going guy reduced to foot-stamping and brattish demands that the world looks at him. The nature of Twitter (anonymous, easily given to largely imaginary conflict) also meant that, rather than making the pithily hilarious #leadersdebate comments now expected of me, I was instead immediately defending myself of accusations from a number of Twitter users of being variously: bitter, delusional, obsessive and (Twitter’s resident rapier-wit comeback) ‘a cunt’. It was Assault On Precint Vivmondo. There were, I hasten to add, a number of people – all total strangers – ready to leap to my defence, to whom I remain pathetically grateful. I wasn’t entirely sure how to feel. Were my actions unreasonable and childish? Was there any way of staking my ownership on a joke in such a public forum? Was it possible hundreds of people had genuinely thought up the same joke in the same exact words at the same time? Was I ‘a cunt’? It was all very disorientating.
By the time the third leaders’ debate came round (coincidentally my birthday), Twitter was awash with ‘This is the worst Kraftwerk/Kraftwek gig ever’ tweets. If you did a search for all the word “kraftwerk’, or indeed ‘kraftwek’, as I constantly did, you’d be inundated with ’20 new tweets’ alerts (again, if you’ve never run a search on Twitter, this means a lot of people were repeating it), some citing me as the joke’s author, most not. I still had no idea how to feel. Some people were demanding I kick arse and make my ownership of the joke known to as many people as possible, like some kind of poindexter Vin Diesel, waving his prefect-badge about and confiscating everyone’s satirical catapults. Others said I should leave it and try to retain whatever vestiges of dignity they claimed I still had. A number of people told me ‘you can’t own a joke’, something I very much disputed, resulting in someone labeling me ‘a typical American, always wanting to OWN things’, a remarkable claim given that, whilst the latter is true (I do want to own things), I’m disappointingly and relentlessly British. In the end my actions flopped about somewhere in between kicking arse and doing nothing like an indecisive fish: I tried to make a few humourous and casually self-deprecating remarks about the joke’s popularity, all marked with a tone of ‘hands off my joke!’ hostility and an abject bewilderment. By the time people had stopped repeating the joke (an alarmingly long time after the election result had been and gone) I figured that, although I’d looked a bit mental, I’d also, quite accidentally, handled it the right way. No-one likes to come cross as an angry, overly proprietorial loon on Twitter (god forbid on Twitter!), but at the same time, I do think a person has a right to defend what is essentially their written work. It might be a very small number of words, and it might be a joke (a grey-area in public ownership), and it might be on a relatively niche public website (as, unimaginably, Twitter once was), but that’s merely the medium being used and the same rules should still apply to a stupid misspelled joke on stupid Twitter as to any other written work published anywhere else. It was still my joke.
Birds
This t-shirt comes from an online distributor called Threadless. It’s a little too small for me and, if I’m ever reaching up or lifting something up (pictured), it inevitably reveals my disgusting, sagging midriff for all to see (not pictured). It comes from America.
On September 1st 1914, in Cincinnati Zoo – one of the oldest in the United States – at around 5:00pm, a bird called Martha, named after George Washington’s wife, was found dead at the bottom of her cage.
Martha was the last of a species called the passenger pigeon. A hundred years earlier, there had been more passenger pigeons than any other bird on the planet. Alexander Wilson, an early proponent of what we’d now call bird-watching, wrote of a flock he saw passing between Kentucky and Indiana in 1800 and estimated it was made up of 2.2 billion birds. Other early settlers in North America wrote of the bird’s migrations as extending for miles on end and tended to put its population somewhere around 4 billion. Their flocks, it was said, would cause the skies to grow dark, the air thunderous with the beating of their wings. One flock, seen in Ontario in 1866, took a full 14 hours to pass over a single point.
The arrival of man into any landscape pretty much always results in a demise of native wildlife: settlers expand out into their surroundings, claiming areas for farming, lumber and fuel. Like all creatures native to these areas the passenger pigeon suffered from this expansion; but, on the whole, their decline was executed in a far more intimate manner. The vast numbers they travelled in made them exceedingly easy targets and mostly they were shot for food. Their sheer quantity, however, also led settlers to quickly develop a grizzly attitude of sport around the bird. Competitions sprang up around their migration trail, all almost exclusively with one goal: to shoot as many birds as possible. One competition required participants to bring down a minimum of 30,000 just to be in contention for the prize. Seemingly in a prolonged state of delirium at the limitless riches on offer, and charged with a need to supply food for a rapidly increasing and expanding population, the slaughter increased as the century drew on. It also got increasingly bizarre.
Professional hunters of the bird, inspired by the successful methods of industrial production, tried to come up with new techniques for slaughtering the birds in larger numbers: grain soaked in alcohol to make them drunk and sluggish; large, elaborate netting contraptions; bushels of burning sulphur below their nests to suffocate them; acres of trees set alight simply to scare the birds out; one especially gruesome method involved the capture of a live pigeon which would then have its eyelids sewn shut and be left as bait, attracting others with its distressed calls.
None of this, of course, seemed to make the number of birds diminish especially visibly. Things were beginning to change though, the rapid evolution of communication and transport in the country allowing the killing to be carried out with ever-increasing efficiency. April 1871 saw the largest nesting assembly of the bird on record – some 136 million birds blanketing the plains of south central Wisconsin. The telegraph system, recently installed nationwide, allowed the hunters to track the pigeons, pursuing them relentlessly from site to site as they took flight and moved on, effortlessly wiping out whole exhausted colonies at a time. The other great innovations of the period, railroad cars, were used to ship out millions of the pigeons to butchers and general stores across the country at an average of 20 cents a dozen.
Another gathering occurred in Michigan seven years later, but it was to be the last. The population plummeted sharply towards the latter end of the century. The last recorded sighting of a passenger pigeon in the wild was in Ohio 1900. Fittingly, it was shot. By 1909, Cincinnati Zoo had the three remaining birds on the planet, two males and a female, all the offspring of previously confined birds, and the final chance to bring the species back from the brink of extinction, to restore the vast drumming of countless billions of wings back to the skies, to see the plains of Ontario grow dark once again with their passing overhead. By 1910, however, only the female – Martha – remained. She survived a further four years then, caged and alone, she died.
But there’s no time to mourn for Martha, I’m afraid. Now we must zip forwards in time a hundred years later. It is the present day. Things are very different here: at present the earth’s population consumes something like 50 billion animals every year, a number which is likely to double over the next forty years. If our eating habits remain as they are, the vast majority of these animals we eat will continue to be those which the modern age has found to be the most easily and effectively farmed: chickens.
There’s something of a vogue for organic meat these days, particularly chickens: we like to think of ourselves as a discerning and compassionate generation of consumers, much more careful in selecting what we eat than in the recent past. Sadly, the statistics show this is to be somewhat of an illusion: 96 percent of the chickens we consume are hatched and slaughtered in factory conditions. The mechanization of meat production in America has evolved beyond recognition since the passenger pigeon’s demise and has become the standard industry model the world has seen fit to replicate.
Chickens found their lives beginning to grow shorter in the 1950s when farmers discovered that, instead of simply waiting for the chickens to reach their adult size, they could be brought indoors when they reached 10 weeks old and force-fed oats and animal fat using the bluntly apposite ‘cramming machine’. Shortly after this, it was also found that introducing antibiotics into the chickens’ feed caused them to grow faster still and meant they didn’t get sick. Finally, it was discovered that containing them in barns with the lights kept meant they would eat (and grow) around the clock. The foundations for what would become modern meat production were established.
By the 1970s chickens were being bred to specific internal biological patents, in pursuit of a bird which put on weight faster, younger, with less feed: the bird we’ve now grown familiar with. Chickens are essentially babies when they’re killed – normally 38-40 days old – but have been forced to a grotesquely proportioned adult size at an unnatural pace. These days the constant lighting used in the factory farms is kept dim so as to discourage the birds from moving about and losing any weight. Around half of all broiler birds develop something called tibial dyschondroplasia – a condition where the weight of their bodies causes their leg-bones to buckle and twist. Unsurprisingly, this means that a lot of the birds, at 6 weeks, tend to spend much of their lives motionless: lying down, rising only to eat.
All of this may sound unpleasant (it is unpleasant), but the worst potential for suffering comes at the end of a chicken’s life. 900 million chickens and hens a year are slaughtered in the UK; the process each of them goes through is as follows.
A team of ‘catchers’ enters the sheds to gather the chickens by hand; the legal maximum they’re allowed to bunch together is three in each which are carried upside down to a crate. Increasingly common in the UK are machines which hoover the birds up through a large nozzle and drop them into the crate. They’re then packed into plastic containers – the sort you may have seen stacked up inside passing lorries.
On arrival at the slaughterhouse the plastic containers are forklifted from the lorry into the plant. The birds are removed, then have their legs slotted upside down into metal manacles so they’re hanging from a long, moving wire. They’re moved through a stunning bath, which is precisely what it sounds like: a basin of salt-water with an electrical charge running through it. The aim with this is not to kill the chickens but merely to ensure they’re unconscious. The stunning bath has become the most controversial element of the killing process: many of the birds, as you or I or any other animal might do in the situation, lift their heads to avoid the water. The Humane Slaughter Association (for there is such a thing) estimates that of the average 13,200 birds which are killed every hour, around 30 to 50 of them remain conscious when killed.
This killing is done by the line of birds passing before a rotating blade which cuts through the chickens’ necks, severing the vessels carrying blood between the brain and heart. In the UK a double blade is used – whereas the USA favours just one – and a person is now required on each production line to make sure each of the birds is dead.
After this they’re moved through to the bleed tunnel and then the scald tank to sap the blood, loosen the feathers and strip them clean; then the chicken’s feet and head are removed; they’re refrigerated; and finally they’re take to the factory floor where they’re gutted, stuffed and packaged-up to be sent out, sold and eaten.
When looking at our progress as a species it’s customary to read our history as a narrative of improvement, the achievements of each generation bettering those of the previous, the good things we do broadly outnumbering the bad, nudging our enlightenment forward. This, on the whole, is probably true, but those bad things are still worth bad things and, as such, worth addressing.
I should say that this is categorically not the point at which this about-faces into a haranguing animal liberation. There is always more than enough human bloodshed to make any talk of life and death of animals seem pretty much unimportant. But it isn’t unimportant: it seems we’ve voided any sense of equilibrium when it comes to animals; while the sight of a person in pain will cause us to flinch or weep or intervene, we’re often content to view suffering on a far more imposing scale if it happens to be inflicted on animals.
Curiously, animal-libbers seem to have little interest in industrialised meat (or leather) production, preferring to direct their attention towards the undeniably more essential work going on at medical laboratories, no doubt due to the more appealing critters in question. Also, as with the rest of us, the super-abundance of chickens and the other animals we consume has bred a moral murkiness in our minds: their ubiquity and sheer number cause us to deny them their evident sentience, and to do so on a quietly titanic scale.
In each of these birds, in the stories of their fates, we see the inverse of the other: both are stories of excess; but whereas one, the passenger pigeon, was numerous enough to fill the sky and become hastily blitzed from creation not long after man discovered it, the chicken, on the other hand, is now a monstrous parody of extinction, currently numbering more than double the amount of people on the planet. If there is a theme which both stories share it’s one which has plainly been constant to human history: animals uprooted from nature and brutalised for the sake of a sensation, a taste on our tongues.
And that’s why I like this t-shirt.
Words
I bought this t-shirt from the Burma Campaign website, roughly ten years ago. I imagine it cost about £15. You probably can’t see from the photo, but there’s a small yet prominent oil stain across its front, a recent and accidental addition of uncertain origin. Despite this sad bit of soiling, it’s a comfortable and well made item of clothing, and remains eminently suitable for wearing when one is sure one won’t be seen out and about by friends (or enemies) and find oneself deemed slobbish and slovenly accordingly. When it arrived in the post, this t-shirt, I seem to recall it was accompanied by a slip of paper explaining that the Burmese phrase translates as ‘killer of kings’ or something of the sort, and is a nickname of an important political prisoner (possibly Ko Mya Aye – horrendous racist that I am, I have trouble with such names). The thing I actually like about the design on this shirt is simply how it looks, the shape of the written characters, the loops and unpronounceable shapes. It looks like how I imagine an alien code would look.
I don’t really like Arthur Scargill, but he once famously said something along the lines of ‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.’ I like this quote: there’s a measure of truth to it. But it suggests another question: what if those in power have failed or deliberately opted not to master words? Upon what does one’s life then depend?
A recent news story has caught my interest. The story regards a joke: a Twitter user, Paul Chambers, on discovering his flight from Robin Hood Airport near Doncaster had been cancelled due to snow, posted the following tweet (obviously in a less blurred form):
Within a week of this (admittedly quite poor) joke, Paul had been arrested and taken away for an eight hour police questioning, had his laptop and phones confiscated, and eventually found himself charged with ‘causing menace’ under the Communications Act of 2003. A £1000 fine was subsequently levied.
What is there about this story which to find interesting? Firstly, I’m slightly ashamed to say I like Twitter and, given I often find myself spending tellingly large amounts of my free time and effort on it, can get unpleasantly arsey and sarcastic when it comes under attack. Admittedly, to attack it on grounds of banality and narcissism is more traditional; points must be added for originality in categorising it as a hive for public declarations of terrorist intent. So clap clap. Well done, Crown Prosecution Service. Those who disregard it as a flurry of banal navel-gazing, lists and photographs of consumed meals and rampant overuse of the word ‘lol’ often have a point, but, in my arsey and sarcastic opinion, people who think this should probably shut their stupid, disgusting mouths because they’re overlook the more enjoyable aspects: its immediacy; its internationalism; the disparate wonders of the internet – online articles, political dialogue, photographs of animals dressed as other animals – that an ever-bubbling shoal of wired-in nerds provides (sorry, but you are nerds); and, pertinently, its suitability as a medium for jokes.
An interesting aspect of the Paul Chambers case is the narrative the story itself tells: a man of ball-achingly obvious innocence finds himself accused of a crime which hasn’t been committed. He is found guilty. And why not? The authorities have a confession which was written and published online before to this non-committed crime was non-committed, of course: how else would they know to arrest him? This may not quite be a journey to the heart of Kafka country, but it certainly approaches a wee sightseeing minibreak cruise around the coast. Look at that ‘tweet’ again; doesn’t it perhaps seem like the sort of thing you’re likely to say to someone, possibly via an email or a text message (or via Twitter, if you use it), in similar circumstances? At the risk of sounding terribly Radio 4 Appeal-ish, imagine how it would feel to then find yourself, like Paul (or Josef K.), suddenly without a job but with a hefty fine, and a criminal record of dubious merit and standing.
Paul Chambers’ defence lawyer has been reported as saying that part ‘of the importance of this case is that if this tweet is somehow of menacing character, so would countless others from the playground to Twitter users across society, day by day.’ He then goes on to (mis)quote the opening of John Betjeman’s ‘Slough’: ‘Come friendly bombs drop on Slough.’ Is Betjeman innocent and Chambers guilty solely because the former is a Knight Bachelor writing a poem and the latter a (now sacked) trainee accountant causing his ‘menace’ in something as vulgarly modern as ‘a tweet’? Is this fair? ‘The point,’ says Stephen Ferguson, Paul’s lawyer, ‘is an obvious one.’ Obvious seems an understatement. If I were trying to argue against this clusercunt of a conviction I’d find it difficult to know where to start: its idiocy seems so comprehensive, the irrefutable arguments one could level against the prosecution so obvious and so numerous that they practically crowd round for attention, bartering for indignant courtroom extrapolation. This must be the real reason why lawyers get paid in high-end hookers, sandbags of premium blow and Bond-villain quantities of jewel-studded gold: unless you’re specially trained, deliriously wealthy, well sexed and completely off your face you risk getting lost amid the swarming confusion, disbelief and cynicism.
Currently, Paul is in the midst of his appeal against the court’s original decision. I hope he’s successful, because of his patent innocence (you can find a better discussion the prosecution’s failure to adequately demonstrate the defendant’s intent elsewhere), but also for slightly more abstract reasons.
Words, sentences, paragraphs, passages – these things are any old shit anyone can come up with, it’s really not that difficult – even some of the cleverer gorillas can manage it. But to transform them from simple signifying squiggles on a page (or screen) into full-blown agents of emotion and thought requires a little more nouse, something almost all adults possess, with the important exception of [insert the name of your hometown here].
An aspect of the way we use language is our power for comprehending double meanings, our ability to say, hear or read something and ‘get’ it more than one level. For example: a euphemism in which something which isn’t sex is mentioned but which everyone knows is sex; the white lie your parents listened to about a man who came into the house and stole their toaster (which you broke by using it as a torture chamber for He-Man and Battle Cat to glean important information from Skeletor, for instance); a self-effacingly ironic confession of racism in relation to not being able to remember a Burmese name. They might not seem like it but you’ll just have to trust me: these are valuable aspects of our linguistic culture.
Should a state make the decision to take any statements it encounters at face value, the worst-case scenario is that such facets would become lost. Delete a word from the language and you also delete one’s knowledge and understanding of what that word signifies. Likewise, once a specific layer of meaning is willfully peeled away from the language and binned, our ability to grasp that concept follows. If we are no longer permitted to use the context of irony in our language, to what ends would we put our ironic imagination? What I’m saying is this: language would become predominantly a form of basic, factual communication, little more, and we’d all turn into Data, the pasty, uncomprehending android from Star Trek: The Next Generation and spend the rest of eternity emotionlessly biting one another’s face-skin off (if you think this is an exaggeration, rather than a genuine, terrified prophecy, you still have your powers of deduction. Well done. Do you see? It was a test.)
Public figures – politicians and journalists, most notably – have no shame in habitually heaving up euphemisms (non-sexual, for the most part) and spewing them up in speeches and interviews, invariably to deceive members of the public on the true nature of an issue. This has become such a central part of public life that we now see and understand whenever euphemism is being employed. In fact, we expect it to such a degree that we detect it, usually in those whose policies or beliefs we don’t favour, even when it isn’t evident. Consider the following remark, made by Tony Blair:
“Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.”
Spoiler alert! Our generation did go to war. But Blair is saved, in this statement at least, by qualifying what he says with ‘able to’ and ‘contemplate’ and ‘may’. Blair in seeming-to-say-one-thing-but-actually-saying-nothing-then-doing-the-oppostie-of-what-we-all-thought-he’d-originally-said SHOCKER. In the ensuing build-up to war, Blair famously employed the more straightforwardly euphemistic phrase ‘regime change’ and, all the while, Downing Street released statement upon statement including the phrase ‘No decision has been made to invade Iraq’ whilst the military prepared for just that. Yet it’s clear in doing all this Blair wasn’t attempting to be ironically humourous (would his actions, we could ask, have been any less disturbing if he revealed that, rather than delusionally messianic self-regard, they were actually motivated solely ‘for teh lolz’ all along?).
Wisely, these are qualities politicians rarely strive for (even more rarely with any success, as I’m confident gangly joy-void Lembit Opik’s stand-up career will testify). Their use of double-meaning and euphemism serves only to beef up their political purchase or legitimise a later u-turn in policy. Incidentally, I don’t single out Blair because I have a particular gripe with him. If anything I’ve grown so weary of the loud and mindless Blair-bashers I’m often almost inclined to agree with him even when I disagree with him, if you follow (it’s an interesting inverse of something I like to call ‘the Bono effect’). But when thinking about deceitful politicians, his grinning lie-mark of a face is unfortunately the first to pop into one’s head. It’s worth pointing out that our ability to see euphemisms such as Blair’s for what they are has become an integral part of our capacity to ironise – our ability to see a statement, a sentence and understand that tucked up inside it is a different, possibly contradictory meaning. I give you the cliché of the double-edged sword: the timeless phenomenon of willfully duplicitous statesmen is, I suppose, a price we pay for the gift of irony.
But this is different. No matter how minor the Paul Chambers case might seem, to allow a state body to decide that the use of irony in the mock-declaration of an act of terrorism provides no exemption from prosecution, or even from suspicion of guilt, is to dump a huge, depressing turd all over any of these finer points for those who find themselves caught in the glare of such allegations. The message is clear: if you think there’s a chance what you write could be misconstrued, don’t write it down. This is not a healthy state of affairs.
The best analogy I can think of when talking about language and how we should think of it is the creationist myth of (natch) creation. On its own, in some imaginary person-less vacuum, language has no power. It is not anything, or, if it is anything, it’s merely a bunch of sounds and letter-shaped lines, floating and drifting, forming unlinked and shapeless passages by bumping into and coasting past one another. It’s only a creator – in this case not some Republican jizz-fantasy deity, but the human mind – which invests it with any meaning and, subsequently, any personal and social power. Open a book and look at what’s written there – a mess of letters, lines, dots, dashes, strokes and curves. Their meaning comes about only through the filter of our shared and learned understanding, a small part of which is what we call irony. At the heart of the Paul Chambers case, as I see it, is an attempt to criminalise irony. This may only be an individual case, but in law individual cases set precedence and breed like hillbillies. To have more court cases like this one would result in the deliberate warping of a small part of our human nature. Irony, humour and language are things which have taken us the entire course of our evolutionary progress to cultivate; they need constant vigilance and protection if they are to remain continually, restlessly evolving.
And that is why I like this old, stained t-shirt.
Next month: CHICKENS!
