by Sam Byers
‘It goes to the heart of our campaign.’
‘Don’t say campaign.’
‘Why not?’
‘It comes across kind of campaigny. You need to be, like: I feel incredibly strongly about this issue whether it’s in a campaign context or not.’
‘So it’s more sort of: regardless of the campaign.’
‘Say something like: this isn’t about politics.’
‘Maybe I could even say politics slightly disparagingly?’
‘Yeah. Politics. Eyeroll.’
‘Making the point that there are actually people out there who want to make this about politics.’
‘Yes! Like, fuck those people.’
‘Scoring points.’
‘Oh, I love that. You’re not trying to score political points here.’
‘Unlike some people.’
‘Those other politicians.’
‘With their politics.’
‘Right. Not you. You’re all about the principle.’
‘I feel like we need to get the word duty in here somewhere.’
‘Oh, totally. But make it our duty, not your duty. It’s more rallying.’
‘When we see something like this, we have a duty to do something about it.’
‘Collectively.’
‘We have a duty to say: no.’
‘Can we use the expression line in the sand?’
‘You don’t think it’s kind of a cliché?’
‘I do but I think it’s a good one.’
‘How about we forget the sand but keep the line? As in, where do we draw the line?’
‘It’s like you’re saying to the interviewer, and by extension the viewers: where do you draw the line?’
‘I’m all for tolerance.’
‘Good. You’re literally all for it.’
‘But—’
‘Don’t say but. The minute you say something like, I’m all for tolerance or I’m as appalled by racism as the next man or whatever, everyone on Twitter immediately tweets that they feel a but coming. And then as soon as you say but, they all tweet that they just tweeted that you were about to say but and they think it’s hilarious.’
‘I’m all for tolerance. The question is, where does tolerance end?’
‘With genocide, that’s where.’
‘Serious genocide.’
‘We need to get the estate in here, Hugo.’
‘I want to talk about that guy. That old guy.’
‘Agreed. Push the old guy.’
‘Because he’s vulnerable.’
‘But that’s not why you’re pushing him.’
‘Right.’
‘I mean, it is, but not in the way that it sounds.’
‘He needs protection.’
‘He shouldn’t need protection, but he does.’
‘It’s frankly an outrage that he needs protection.’
‘I like it. You’re just assuming he needs protection because who wouldn’t assume that given the situation?’
‘It’s obvious.’
‘Obvious to you, but not to everybody.’
‘Look at where we are.’
‘Nice.’
‘Actually having to protect a vulnerable old man from—’
‘From his neighbour.’
‘This vulnerable old man, who has never asked for anything—’
‘Right. Hang on. Tie this back to the woman. Because she’s … Well, her boyfriend—’
‘Right. Benefits.’
‘Can we play with the word benefits?’
‘There she is, soaking up the benefits of the welfare state, able to live happily and freely in a tolerant society that turns a blind eye not only to her race but to her lifestyle choices, her beliefs. A society that allows her to express those beliefs freely. And what does she do? How does she use what she’s been given? To spread hatred. To fuel intolerance.’
‘While just a few doors down—’
‘While a few doors down, on her very doorstep, this vulnerable old man, who has never asked for so much as a penny, who keeps himself to himself and bothers no-one, is living in fear. Is that fair?’
‘Boom.’
‘Is that equal?’
‘Preach it, big guy.’
‘Is that the kind of free and fair and tolerant society we want to live in?’
‘Hell no.’
‘No.’
‘High-five me, Hugo.’
‘You know what? I think I will. Bang. High five. And fuck you, Vivian Ross.’
*
‘Because no-one’s saying, let’s not have debate, right?’
‘Right, exactly. If anything, we’re saying, let’s have more debate.’
‘Better debate.’
‘It’s about the quality of debate, is what this is about.’
Robert and Jacques DeCoverley were sitting in one of Edmundsbury’s numerous chain cafés, all of which masqueraded as independents by overstuffing themselves with mass-produced bric-à-brac artfully scuffed to a uniform vintage.
‘I love this, Robert,’ said DeCoverley, taking an exploratory sip of his double espresso and breathing deeply through his nose in the manner of a man merrily at large in the world and soaking everything up. ‘I mean, this is why I felt I could reach out to you. We’re like flint and tinder here, wouldn’t you say?’
Robert was unsure who was the flint and who was the tinder in that analogy but decided it was best to agree without complicating the issue. Not complicating the issue was essentially Robert’s mission for the day. In a brief space of time, everything had become hopelessly complicated, and now his capacity for complexity was exhausted.
Much of the noise in Robert’s head concerned Julia Benjamin. She had, for quite some time, been a continual background hum in his consciousness, an irritating tinnitus drifting occasionally to the fore. Now, though, she was a full-tilt roar, a near-symphonic distraction.
Apparently unwilling to constrain herself to her rightful place in the comments section, Benjamin had made her own website. Here, she said in a brief and hugely pompous introduction, she would be mapping (her term) the connections between apparently disparate expressions of self-serving white male opinion and then extrapolating what she called an ecosystem. Taking Robert’s original post about Darkin as a jumping-off point, she had highlighted a series of key words and phrases that she had then mapped not just across Robert’s column, but across a number of other columns from the same recent time period, including, to Robert’s dismay, a piece published by Hugo Bennington the morning before Robert had written about Darkin. The linguistic and rhetorical connection with Bennington made, Julia Benjamin was then able to produce a graphic breaking down Robert and Bennington’s shared columnistic mode and the common ideological assumptions underpinning their arguments. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Benjamin had also taken the time to connect various key indicators from Bennington’s column to all sorts of dubious forums and message boards discussing everything from men’s rights to white power where those exact same indicators were deployed and where, Benjamin triumphantly pointed out, Robert’s column about Darkin had also been widely shared, the end result being that she was able to establish a clear connection between Robert’s recent drift from a broadly left-of-centre position and the fact that Brute Force were now physically intimidating people on the streets of Edmundsbury. More targets would follow, she promised. Everyone, from Stefan Ziegler to Jacques DeCoverley to Rogue Statement and back again, would be implicated.
Sadly, this was not the only horror with which Robert had begun his day. Upon opening his emails and checking through the notifications by which he kept tabs on mentions of his own name, he’d quickly been alerted to the fact that Hugo Bennington, of all people, had also written about him, in that morning’s Record column. Far from taking reactionary aim at Robert’s ideas as Robert might have hoped, Bennington had instead opted for the more damaging and embarrassing course of praising Robert and, in a particularly unpleasant move, welcoming him i
nto some kind of shared political fold, which in light of the Benjamin website now read less like the fiendish bit of politicking it so clearly was and more like a damning evidential footnote to Benjamin’s charges.
And what did Robert have out there? What piece, this morning, stood as his contribution to the chaos of positioning happening all around him? Some strident defence of a worthy cause? Some valiant trumpeting of his own rigorously right-on stance? No. He had a lengthy rant about political correctness, double standards, and the genocide tweeter.
‘Because what we don’t want,’ said DeCoverley, ‘is to leave ourselves open to the accusation that we’re trying to shut down debate.’
‘God no.’
‘That’s why we need to be clear: we love debate. We welcome it. The point is that this …’ – he made a little line in front of him with his forefingers, as if literally underlining his point – ‘is not debate.’
‘We’re actually trying to have a debate,’ said Robert, ‘and what’s happening? We’re being threatened.’
‘And not just us,’ said DeCoverley. ‘Because one thing I feel very, very strongly about here is that this is about so much more than just us. It’s about …’ He pinched his lips as if his own thought had given rise to a swell of emotion within him. ‘It’s about the future.’
‘Not our future,’ said Robert, ‘but the future.’
‘Right,’ said DeCoverley. ‘The future of free intellectual discussion in Britain.’
‘And not just Britain,’ said Robert. ‘Because we’re talking about the web here. And if all intellectual discussion is going to take place on the web, then we’re really talking about the global future of free intellectual debate.’
‘Benjamin’s just a symptom,’ said DeCoverley.
‘Right. And by treating the symptom …’
They both sat back, contemplating this for a moment.
‘I mean,’ said DeCoverley, after a period of reflective introspection, ‘it’s not even as if I’m angry, you know? I mean, I am angry, but that’s not the overriding emotion here. I was talking about this with Lionel Groves just the other day and he of course agreed completely. I feel saddened. Don’t you?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Robert. ‘It’s sad all round.’
‘I mean, there are mornings when I wake up and I just frankly despair, don’t you?’
‘Oh God, I mean, recently I’ve been questioning why I even bother.’
‘I think people like Julia Benjamin think what we do is easy,’ said DeCoverley.
‘Or that we’re privileged.’
‘Oh God, yes, that word. Privileged.’
‘That’s the word that really bothers me.’
‘As if, you know, just because I’ve had the benefit of a private education,’ said DeCoverley.
‘Exactly,’ said Robert, keen to gloss over the fact that he had not, in fact, had the benefit of a private education, but noting secretly, just in case credentials were called for in the future, that he was demonstrably less privileged than DeCoverley.
‘I’ve literally spent my whole life sharpening my mind,’ said DeCoverley. ‘And now I’m supposed to apologise for that?’
‘No way,’ said Robert, ignoring the obvious point that if DeCoverley had really spent his whole life sharpening his mind there would now be nothing left except a whittled stub and a heap of shavings.
‘It’s almost as if,’ said DeCoverley, ‘the very fact of having some kind of audience is seen as a privilege in itself, when really it’s a terrible burden.’
‘Yes,’ said Robert. ‘Wish that we could all just express ourselves in a quick online comment without having to go through all the work of crafting a decent piece.’
DeCoverley nodded. ‘And the opprobrium we have to deal with.’
‘Yes, so privileged to have to deal with all this shit every day.’
‘And I know what people say,’ said DeCoverley. ‘They say: oh, but look at you, a white, virile, handsome man …’
‘Who are you to complain?’
‘As if we couldn’t possibly have anything to complain about!’
‘As if we don’t have feelings, for fuck’s sake.’
‘You know, Robert,’ said DeCoverley, seemingly settling in to his subject, folding his hands in his lap and addressing not quite Robert’s face but instead a vague mid-space somewhere just over Robert’s left shoulder, as if reading his lines from a distant autocue, ‘the honest truth is, if you’re a man of the left, like myself, like yourself, and if you’ve devoted yourself, as we have, to any kind of credible intellectual left-wing project, you see this all the time. That’s what’s so saddening about the whole thing, don’t you think?’
‘The pointlessness of it,’ said Robert, taking a guess because he wasn’t exactly sure what DeCoverley was talking about.
‘Because what do we want, Robert?’ said DeCoverley, tearing his eyes from his imaginary teleprompt and fixing his gaze directly on Robert. ‘We want change. We want alternatives. What we want, Robert, is a better world. Am I right?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Robert. He was struggling to think of anyone who might seriously want a worse world, but he felt the point was probably unhelpful.
‘And our great gift,’ DeCoverley went on, ‘as well as our great curse, is that we can see that world.’ DeCoverley leaned forward across the table, locking eyes with Robert and pinching his fingers together in the space between them as if literally holding up a piece of reality. ‘Do you think everyone can see it, Robert? Of course they can’t. They can see, at best, their tiny little piece. And a lot of people can’t even see that. So what do they do? They look for the obvious. I’m black therefore I’m oppressed. I’m a female therefore I’m oppressed. It’s all just noise, Robert. And because of all that noise, people are incapable of listening. They’re ignorant of the fact that there are people like us, people who want to help them, people who want to help us all. Is Julia Benjamin going to change anything? Can Julia Benjamin see the world as it is, as we can?’ He shook his head. ‘Of course not.’
‘It’s about the greater good, isn’t it?’ said Robert.
‘Go on,’ said DeCoverley.
‘Well, what we’re doing is important. It’s important in all sorts of big-picture ways. And here’s Julia Benjamin, or one of her cronies, or whoever, saying, hey, this doesn’t take account of me. And you know what? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it doesn’t need to. Because maybe it takes into account more than that, meaning that Julia Benjamin isn’t just irrelevant, she’s—’
‘Dangerous,’ said DeCoverley.
‘And not just dangerous to us, dangerous to … Well, everything, really.’
‘We’ve got a responsibility here, Robert.’
‘That’s how I’m starting to see it, yes.’
‘A responsibility to act.’
‘Completely.’
‘Not just for ourselves, but for the principle. Or, actually, many principles.’
‘Yes. The very notion of principles.’
‘Exactly. So. What are we going to do?’
‘What?’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘Do?’
‘Do. About Julia Benjamin. What are we going to do about her?’
‘Right.’
Robert thought about Julia Benjamin. He felt his hatred shifting, coating itself not in its usual exterior of guilt and uncertainty, but in a new patina of righteous ire. He hated her, now, on behalf of others, in the name of principles.
He thought of Silas, their conversations over Skype. Slowly, through the fog of indignity and inflated purpose, an idea began to form.
‘So,’ said Robert slowly, allowing himself the maximum possible time to develop a coherent line of reason, ‘Julia Benjamin wants to kick back against this supposed tyranny of male opinion. Am I right? She thinks we’re misogynists. She thinks we’re some kind of establishment.’
‘Laughable,’ said DeCoverley. ‘But true, yes.’
‘She t
hinks we’re the enemy.’
‘Definitely.’
‘But what if there was another enemy? A … A worse enemy?’
‘Go on.’
‘My editor at The Command Line said something interesting. He said that once what he called the bro brigade got wind of Julia Benjamin, they’d be all over her. I’ve been waiting for it to happen but suffice to say it hasn’t happened.’
‘But what if it did happen, is what you’re saying.’
‘I’m saying: what if Julia Benjamin, who has been merrily commenting away, exercising her right to free speech at the expense of our freedom of speech because she genuinely seems to think we’re the absolute worst the world has to offer, suddenly got a glimpse of people who were genuinely the worst the world had to offer, and who genuinely wanted to oppress her?’
DeCoverley made either a gun or a steeple by interlacing his fingers with the forefingers extended and then pressing the forefingers against his lips. It was a pose Robert had seen him strike for at least two separate author photographs.
‘It’s very interesting in terms of reversal,’ said DeCoverley. ‘And I think it’s kind of psychologically interesting too, don’t you?’
‘You mean in terms of …’
DeCoverley stopped tapping his fingers against his lips and returned his hands to his lap, where his thumbs started to make little circles around each other in a way that Robert found distracting.
‘What does Julia Benjamin really want?’ said DeCoverley.
‘Attention,’ said Robert. ‘It’s literally that simple.’
‘But go deeper with that. What is attention, really? What is the ultimate attention? The attention we all essentially crave?’
‘Fame?’
‘Being fucked,’ said DeCoverley. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Well, she certainly seems—’
‘Uptight?’ said DeCoverley. ‘I should say so. Imagine her, sitting around her house on her own. I imagine that she’s terribly ugly, don’t you? A person who really, in a different existence, had she not so determinedly undermined such important intellectual work, would be worthy of our sympathy.’
‘Well, I have to say I find it rather difficult to sympathise with her at this point, but I sort of see what you’re saying, yes.’
‘Now, obviously, we can’t arrange for her to be fucked …’